‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

364 points · 260 comments · kmeh

  1. nijave · · focus · HN ↗
    This ignores the lifecycle involved with memory. It doesn't appear to have a concept of time or reconciliation (both issues we're having at work). A memory might be relevant for a week or a month, but it might no longer matter after that ie "we're migrating systems so keep <thing> in mind"--that doesn't matter after the migration is complete. I guess the offered solution implicitly supports reconciliation since the agent can keep history of its memories and rewrite them, but it doesn't appear to be very first-class and it doesn't seem like there's anything intentional unless you prompt it "go check all the docs and make sure everything is consistent".

    It also doesn't seem to have a way to separate preference from factual memory which is useful when you have various humans interacting with the same agent. One human might prefer a certain output style over the other and that's something a memory framework can also address.

    Like the MCP articles a few months ago, it also seems to assume all agents are cli coding harnesses running on your local machine. We have a handful of other things like chat bots, event-driven agents running on servers, chat driven agents running on servers in sandboxes--there's not a single filesystem and even if there were one, having multiple agents try to edit it at once would corrupt it.

    1. higeorge13 · · focus · HN ↗

      [dead]

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.