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Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment

37 points by mthines 3 hours ago | 26 comments

speedping 14 minutes ago

Entire blog post reeks of LLM. If there was an adequately reliable way of detecting LLM text i'd build a browser extension that would just filter it out altogether.

mthines 37 seconds ago

Hey, author here. I wrote the blog post and of course got assistance by AI to rephrase sections as I'm no native english speaker and wanted to improve the writing.

The sections, points, ideas are by me :)

Caracas288 4 minutes ago

That would be great. Or, for the physical world, combining some kind of smart glasses with the new Pangram image detection which seems to work well on rephotographed data. Like the _They Live_ glasses.

jaynate 7 minutes ago

Thought the same thing and was surprised how high this was ranking. I wonder if we are starting to look past the LLM stank and into the core of the idea (which is solid in this case)? If HN, a highly discerning crowd, is able to look past it then many other audiences are probably okay with it too

Fordec 2 hours ago

On the general premise, I agree. But I don't think that moment is today, not yet anyway. I don't think we understand the right way to approach context and memory yet or how long they should last for, never mind standardizing on an abstraction prematurely that ends up being like SOAP or SGML.

andai 18 minutes ago

What's better than SGML? What would XML an HTML look like if they were based on that instead?

dizhn 12 minutes ago

Fully agree. Any solution people think they have today is working on assumptions that are probably not correct. And things are still moving very fast.

jaynate 4 minutes ago

This seems like local memory for one user. The need for corporate agent memory that works across users and company processes is acute.

kohlerm 54 seconds ago

Yes, also I doubt that we already know how to best implement memory for plans. Is it really only files? Maybe some db approach with queries is needed?

hemkeshr 12 minutes ago

I agree this is very much needed but I doubt the other ai companies would a-comply with this as they need users and mainly paid users otherwise they'll lose themselves. What I think is that with 20$ subs of 2-3 ai can give you more usage compared to their 100$ subs if you do it that way. I don't know will these companies work together to form a standardized memory system. I highly doubt that.

totetsu 12 minutes ago

What about .. reference identity.. currently memories and recall are referencing local things, that are specific to the environment they were made. and in ways that are as context eficient as possible like @message100Line10-50 or sessionsabc@100-300 is ./yourfiles/thisfile.mb ..

but is were going to make the memorys portable.. we need to make the things they are pointing to portable also..

imgyuri 2 hours ago

The need for a unified format or spec is greatly reduced in the case of Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats. Even if such instructions did not exist, agents are extremely good at traversing files to get the necessary context it needs.

jstanley 2 hours ago

This is true and it probably is actually fine, but in a way you don't want it to be wasting its reasoning abilities and context window on figuring out which text files to read.

It would be like trying to accomplish something as a human but all your reference material is always in a different format, it would be maddening.

troupo 31 minutes ago

> Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats.

Only it's not read by agents, and largely ignored.

From Anthropic's recent self-congratulatory article:

---start quote ---

Injected memories use up valuable tokens, and an incorrect note can be carried into every session. Loading a note also doesn’t guarantee that Claude acts on it: our documentation on Claude Code warns that longer instruction files reduce adherence

...

It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md

https://www.anthropic.com/research/components-of-agent-memor...

--- end quote ---

hagen8 2 hours ago

Well, coding agents are smart, they can use all kinds of memory. A simple skill on how and when to access it is enough...

totetsu 38 minutes ago

I think It needs to be as diverse as people .. If agents are to become our constant "muse" like companions, I want the wiring of the brain of mine to be as wired as possible.. Why not juggling chain saws in orbit.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio&t=17s

slopinthebag 2 hours ago

at this point i'm pretty convinced agent memory is strictly harmful. it remembers the wrong things, and then turns them into an inane focus for each task. i disable it universally on every harness. if i want memory, i specifically instruct the agent to record findings into a file.

SwellJoe 2 hours ago

Same. Everybody builds one, and then eventually realizes it makes the model stupid and confused. The right solution is pretty much always developer documentation in the repo, in roughly the same shape you'd make developer docs for humans that you want to be able to get up to speed about your codebase really quickly.

This has the benefit of being something you can easily read over every now and then to make sure the model hasn't baked in some random comment you made about a specific circumstance a month ago and made a weird religion out of it.

nonethewiser 8 minutes ago

Also introduces massive confirmation bias. Majorly gimps the model. I remember I was exploring hexagonal architecture on chatgpt and then future conversations with open ended architecture questions just gave me those same patterns.

“Oh damn look its recommending something that looks like hexagonal architecture. I guess hexagonal is a really good - hey wait a second …”

nonethewiser 16 minutes ago

I strongly agree. This is becoming a general principle along the lines of “code comments that describe what the code does are bad.”

Memory just ensures there is a fairly high level of drift and inaccuracy in your context. Unless YOU are manually curating it.

Its similar to wiki systems where your agent produces tons of documentation and decision records, etc. Its a bunch of assertions about your codebase that you aren’t vetting and which is at most 90% correct. Thats good enough for a feature or bug fix that you can validate with tests but for the love of god throw the details away. You don’t want to codify that. It’s polluting the context and gimping the model.

mfkhalil 51 minutes ago

Not trying to be disingenuous but what's wrong with just a normal filesystem?

The best version of memory I've experienced is when I give my agent a memory directory and just let it do what it wants in there, with minimal rules on my end.

alfiedotwtf 29 minutes ago

Files aren’t indexed and vectorised by default

dizhn 8 minutes ago

This is true but is it proven with reasonable confidence that indexing and vectorizing the code provides better results. I would assume it would if another agent is responsible for it and your coding agent only talks to that agent. Even there I am not 100% sure. Probably not worth the effort though.

te_chris 2 hours ago

So we need another complicated format to store information so that the machines which read unstructured text can work with it?

monster_truck 2 hours ago

it's called a markdown file

drix10 56 minutes ago

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happybox2016 46 minutes ago

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mthines 3 hours ago

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ph4rsikal 58 minutes ago

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samedb 20 minutes ago

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Implicated 2 hours ago

I decided long ago to not wait for you all to figure this out.

Index it all. Embed it all. Give your agents the ability to query it all. Eval different configurations to figure out what works best for you.