MODULE 04 — AGENTIC AI · 14 AI Concepts

Memory in AI agents

The desk is wiped when the chat ends. “Agent memory” is three different workarounds for that one fact — and only one of them survives the night.

Store 1 · short-term

This conversation

empty
Store 2 · scratchpad

Notes mid-task

empty
Store 3 · long-term

A searchable store

empty

Follow one fact — “no dairy” — from the moment it is said to the moment it is needed again next week.

The problem it solves

Nothing carries over by itself

MONDAY’S DESK close TUESDAY’S DESK empty, and unaware it ever wasn’t A fact only survives if something deliberately wrote it down before the desk was cleared. that deliberate write is the whole of “memory”

How it works

Three stores, three jobs

free · automatic · gone at midnight it is just the desk
Short-termNot a feature — the desk from page 4, wiped when the chat ends.
checked A, B C still to do so a long job survives its own length
ScratchpadNotes it writes to itself, so step 40 still knows what step 3 found.
a store, outside the chat searched the same way as page 9
Long-termThe coordinate store again — write facts in, search them back next session.

Where it goes wrong

Nothing knows what is worth keeping

WHAT GOT SAVED “no dairy” — worth keeping forever “I’m in a rush today” — saved as a trait “the deadline moved to the 9th” — dropped later and next week it confidently tells you you are always in a hurry, and misses the deadline The model choosing what to remember has no more access to truth than it had on page 8.

So what

An agent that “remembers you” is a store of sentences somebody chose to keep, searched the same fallible way as any other document.