starting to think “agent memory” is the wrong first framing

I’m starting to think “agent memory” is the wrong first framing. The annoying part isn’t just that the agent forgets stuff. It’s that everything gets dumped into the same mental junk drawer: what the user actually said, what the agent guessed, what a tool returned, what the current task needs next, and what should become real long-term memory. Then debugging gets cursed fast. The agent “remembers” something, but you can’t tell if it was a fact, a guess, a stale task note, or just some random context that was nearby when the memory got written. What helped in my own experiments was separating working state from durable memory. Working state is allowed to be messy. Current goal, next step, last failure, “check this before continuing.” That stuff should expire. It’s scaffolding, not personality. Durable memory needs a much stricter path: where did this come from, who is allowed to correct it, what replaced it, and why should it still have authority later? Otherwise every worker agent eventually becomes a tiny memory vandal with good intentions lol. Curious how other people building multi-agent systems are handling this. Are your agents writing into one shared memory store, or do you separate task state from long-term memory?