DEV Community

vivek
vivek

Posted on

I Tried to Give Memory to an AI… and Learned the Hard Way

I’m building Orion, a proactive AI companion. Not just a chatbot — something that actually remembers things over time and can act intelligently before being asked.

**My first attempt was naïve:
“Let’s pass all past memory to the LLM!”

Result: 💸 Massive token usage, 🤯 polluted context, 😅 nonsense answers.

**Second attempt:

“More retrieval = better answers”

Result: LLM got distracted, important memories got buried, cost went up, and I learned that more isn’t always better.

What finally started working: structured memory layers
Short-term memory → current session, quick context
Long-term memory → structured facts like preferences, events
Vector memory → semantic recall for similar past situations
TTL + scoring → forgetting intentionally is a feature

The tricky part isn’t the LLM or the vector DB — it’s deciding what to remember, when to update, and what to forget.

I documented everything:
architecture diagrams, memory flows, mistakes, lessons learned. It’s messy, but real.

Repo (full system + docs + diagrams):
👉 https://github.com/vivek-1314/orion-py

Top comments (0)