Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment

te_chris

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

slopinthebag

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.

imgyuri

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.

monster_truck

it's called a markdown file

Fordec

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.

Implicated

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.

hagen8

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

mfkhalil

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.

totetsu

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

speedping

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.

hemkeshr

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

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..

jaynate

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

mmasu

I am curious about what people do these days and how do they tackle this problem. At repo level you can alter by with AGENTS.md and perhaps a curated set of additional docs with the project history, but as soon as you get out of it and want to have additional context the solutions available are too many - Hindsight, Graphiti, and many others; or simply roll out your own? I would like something I can spin up with Postgres or with an S3 bucket and that writes me .md files while retaining some sort of relationship among different entities - however it looks like there is no “simple” solution out there yet, with many of the existing implementations being way too elaborate and/or requiring exotic DB solutions. Would be very interesting to hear if someone knows of a bare bones solution I can plug into any agent.

grey-area

Should we even be storing 'memories' in text files at all? Imagine how humans would function if we carried our memories around in overflowing notepads and had to consult them every time we wanted to know a fact or remember a person we had met, it would be exhausting and inefficient.

baalimago

Do we really need this..? What LLMs do well is interpret natural language. So it's a sponge for whatever format is used in a specific project: a predefined format is not really needed. Besides, do we really want memory of user A's agents to co-exist with memory of user B? Not really. So the argument for collaboration and sharing is quite slim, at least for coding agents. The repository specific context can be encoded into a docs/ or architecture/ directory, just like it's been done pre-agent times as well. For monitoring deployed agents: maybe. For this I built (yet another) memory management tool slivingdoc.dev, with this it's possible to pull down the durable context of all agents. But here the problem is a distributed system one, not format of the memories.

cryptoboy2283

Do you mean another overcomplicated enteprise standard teeming with constant CVEs to increase surveillance and control?

armchairhacker

Is this a significant problem? It seems like there are 15 solutions to every AI “text format” problem, but all are merely structure over feeding the AI informal English, structure which I believe the “transformer” model is specifically able to strip to a common form (which is how training it on the entire internet worked). AI does benefit from learning to use skills, and being instructed with good structures (like “save [specific important kind of detail] in memories” and “plan before implementing anything”). But none of these memory solutions seem better than any other, they’re basically just different folders. Your CLAUDE.md can say “see AGENTS.md” and AGENTS.md can say “write memories to .agent/memories/“, and I’d be interested in a measurement, but I assume it performs almost the exact same as native CLAUDE.md and .claude/memories. One thing I’ve noticed AI does much better than me, is not have OCD over the “perfect” solution.

hbcdbff

This is slop. If you can’t be bothered to even edit your AI slop, I won’t be bothered to read it.

htsh

I have been running openviking self-hosted for 6+ months now and it has worked well for me. It is open source, self-hostable, and you can bring your own LLM and embedding model. The bytedance team makes it. I often wonder if it does not get attention here in America b/c it is Chinese?