Universal Memory Protocol – a shared format for agent memory

edihasaj

AI agents can already use tools and coordinate, but their memory is fragmented across project files, agent notes, local stores, databases, and vendor-specific systems. Move to a new tool and the context is gone. UMP v0.1 is a shared format plus a simple way to read, write, update, and move agent memory across tools. The goal is memory that's user-owned, auditable, and extensible across agents and runtimes, instead of locked inside one vendor. It's early (v0.1) and I'd love feedback on the format and where it breaks down. Repo and spec are linked from the site.

nullc

Sorry to be a debbie downer, but this reads like LLM slop rather than engineering work. I don't just mean the language on the page-- although that too (not an X it's a Y, over and over again)-- but the absence of the artifacts of ActualEngineering(tm) rather than just a flood of vibes. For example, I would expect to see tables or figures showing task success rates on some benchmarks for agents augmented with and without this proposal, perhaps before and after fine tuning, or running against alternatives or to the extent that there are no alternatives against variations of this design that were considered and rejected. Otherwise what reason is there to think that this design is better than some alternative or even any good at all? Perhaps it causes agents to hallucinate like crazy-- who knows if it hasn't been tested. Work like that is what makes efforts like this worth sharing and worth reading about-- anyone can spend a few minutes and ask their favorite LLM to design such a framework and get something that looks "credible". But in a post LLM world credible alone is externally indistinguishable from anti-social time wasting slop.

crooked-v

> Injection-resistant by mandate > Memory is attacker-controllable input. The spec requires a verify, filter, frame rehydration pipeline. Never string-interpolated into the prompt. Uhhh... so who wants to tell them how LLMs work?

avaer

This seems way too complicated and unnecessary. Agents are perfectly capable of discovering memories on the FS, following agent instructions. I guess this adds indexing and querying but most coding agents have good solutions for this already, and it works automagically for everything, not just memories. What we could use instead is a file system layout standard, which could subsume memories and a lot more. I don't think that's needed either, but it would probably solve more problems than this.

lucrbvi

https://xkcd.com/927/

fizx

The ratio of proofreading to grandiosity is impressive.

aeon_ai

It is 2026. Average people build their own harnesses, and imagine themselves the pioneers of industry. They propose protocols. They code, feverishly, into the night, driven by their vision for the future. It used to be that 'idea guys' were limited by execution. We now feel the avalanche of these ideas, even maybe executed half-decently, fall upon deaf ears and zero market.

samdjstephens

I can see the value in a protocol here, but the issue is these efforts are only as good as the industry adoption that they gain: who is using this? MCP came from Anthropic, A2A from Google so they had big tech backing from day 1. As a developer, I wouldn’t touch this without confidence I can get gains down the line from interoperability.

evil-olive

initial commit 2 days ago [0] added 5500 lines in a single shot. shows every sign of being entirely LLM-generated. with apologies to Andy Warhol - in the future, everyone will have a universal protocol for agent memory that is on the HN front page for 15 minutes. 0: https://github.com/edihasaj/universal-memory-protocol/commit...

fractorial

I would love to know how many countless others on HN, like me, find themselves reading about a very they have built and have been using for months talked about like it’s a revolutionary new idea.

maddmann

People are getting so mentally lazy.

cpard

* …tools, UMP does for memory - negotiated operations over a portable, signed, bi-temporal record … * What is a bi-temporal record? I don’t think I’ve heard the term before and I’d love to learn more.

bryanlarsen

How about just a memory dir in your project's git folder? Agents can run grep just fine.

up2isomorphism

I don’t even want a shared agent memory.

oathvz

I have not seen a bigger slop of repos and projects

conception

You are at stage “Memory Architect”. https://delightful-marigold-803f7f.netlify.app/

slashdave

Doesn't this just sound like a glorified file system?

docheinestages

Why should something like this make it to the front page?

aogaili

A lot of shaming and negative comments. Mainly people annoyed that this is created with LLM usage. Comments like, the author is grandiose, he/she is delusional, the repo was committed yesterday etc. It seems to be a lot of folks in the community are just lethargic to anything created by LLMs. But regarding the idea itself, the author basically abstracted and use MCP as the server/interface. I worked a bit on the memory issue of agents, and I do understand the pain point. So I just looked at the article as a source of aspiration, another interesting idea etc..before LLMs, the author could have just said in a blog, oh why not have a universal protocol for memory? But now the author can actually do it, try it, share it with others, and for one see this as a progress, it might inspire other people.

Garlef

Not sure if this is the right abstraction: The recall seems to need a search term. But would it not be more sensible to assume that the full conversation (+ system parts) CAN inform the recall and some neural network picks the right memory bits? So my fear would be that something like this, if adapted, drags the development into a local optimum that is hard/impossible to get out of.