Memory Engineering — engineer the forgetting, not just the remembering

Portability: 4 stdlib scripts, no APIs/LLM calls/network. They measure and gate; you decide.

What this does

Anyone can give an agent memory: vector store, pipe in the history, retrieve top-k. That works until the history outgrows the context window, the write path costs more than every query it serves, and the store fills with stale state nobody removes. Memory is not a bucket — it is a system with a metabolism.

The shift: a storer optimizes what a system remembers; a memory engineer optimizes what it forgets. The problem was never that an agent forgets — it is that it never forgets on purpose.

The four lenses