Agent Memory and State
What an agent should remember, for how long, where that memory lives, and how it stays consistent with the knowledge layer.
Memory is where agent designs become either robust or unpredictable. This guide separates working state, episodic memory, and durable knowledge, assigns each a store and a lifetime, and shows how to keep them from contradicting one another. It covers the data structures, the retrieval patterns, and the failure modes you will meet in production.
What you will be able to do
- Separate working state, episodic memory, and durable knowledge.
- Choose stores and lifetimes for each kind of memory.
- Design write policies that keep memory from drifting.
- Reconcile agent memory with the shared knowledge layer.
Inside the guide
- 01
Three kinds of memory
Working state, episodes, and knowledge, and why they must not be one table.
- 02
Stores and lifetimes
Context windows, caches, databases, and graphs.
- 03
Write policies
Deciding what an agent is allowed to remember.
- 04
Reconciliation
When memory and the knowledge layer disagree.
- 05
Observability
Inspecting and correcting what an agent believes.
From the guide
The dangerous memory is the one nobody designed. An agent that is allowed to write free text to a long-term store will, within weeks, be reading its own earlier mistakes back as facts.
Who it is for
- Engineers building multi-step or long-running agents.
- Architects designing agent platforms used by several teams.
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