Memory Design

Memory is the most over-built and under-designed part of an agent.

The default question is "what should the agent remember?" The better question is "what must the agent forget so the next turn works?" Memory that doesn't earn its place poisons recall, inflates cost, and produces confidently wrong answers.

When to use this skill

• The user is adding "memory" to a chatbot, copilot, or task agent.
• The user reports the agent recalling stale, wrong, or irrelevant facts.
• The user is choosing between full-history, summary, vector store, or a memory framework (mem0, Letta, MemGPT, Zep).
• The user is conflating "context window" with "memory" — they are not the same.

The four memory types

Distinguish before designing. Mixing them is the root cause of most "memory bugs".