Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Memory is not RAG. RAG retrieves from a curated corpus the agent did not write. Memory is the agent's own evolving record of what happened and what the user prefers. You usually need both. Split memory by type. Short-term (working context) is cheap and volatile; long-term splits into episodic (events), semantic (facts and preferences) and procedural (how-to). Each wants a different store. Tier the storage. A four-tier design — in-context, structured store, vector store, cold archive — keeps retrieval fast and the context window small. Give the agent a memory action space. ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, RETRIEVE, SUMMARY and FILTER as explicit tools beat letting the model improvise. Forgetting is a feature. Time-to-live windows, decay and summarisation stop unbounded growth.…
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