Article 02 of 11

What kinds of memory does an agent need?

3 min read · The sticky note and the card file: semantic, episodic, procedural.

In this blog, we will learn the two big kinds of memory an AI agent has, short-term and long-term, and the three flavours of long-term memory. We will also see why the same fact belongs in a different place depending on how it will be used.

Short-term memory is the context window

Short-term memory is what the model can see right now: the live turns of this conversation. It is the sticky note on the monitor. Cheap to write, always in view, and gone when the session ends.

turn  1   [system | memory | t1                                   ]   ~250 tok
turn  6   [system | memory | t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6                    ] ~1,500 tok
turn 40   [system | memory | ....... 40 x 250 = 10,000 tok ...... ]
                            |
                            v  summarize turns 1 to 35, keep the last 5
turn 40'  [system | memory | summary ~150 tok | t36 t37 t38 t39 t40]

When a single session gets long, we compress the old turns into a summary and keep the newest turns word for word. This is a rolling summary.

One catch: summaries are lossy. The class experiment shows a 14-message trip-planning chat compressed 6.5x into 84 tokens, and the exact "120 euros a night" happened to survive. It is not guaranteed to. Any detail can vanish in a compression pass. That is why long-term memory stores discrete facts, not summaries.

Long-term memory survives the session

Long-term memory is the card file from the last blog. It lives in a database, not in the prompt. It has three flavours, and the names come straight from how psychologists describe human memory.

            the memory of an agent
            +----------------------------------------------+
 SHORT-TERM | working memory = the context window          |
 (this      |   the live turns of this conversation        |
  session)  |   + a rolling summary when it overflows      |
            +----------------------------------------------+
 LONG-TERM  | semantic    facts:   "Maya is vegetarian"    |
 (across    | episodic    events:  "last week we planned   |
  sessions) |                       the Lisbon trip"       |
            | procedural  how-to:  "answer short and       |
            |                       direct"                |
            +----------------------------------------------+

Semantic memory: what is true

Semantic memories are facts about the world and the user. "Maya is vegetarian." "Maya's partner Sam has a birthday on June 18." They tend to stay true for a long time, and when they change, the old one should be replaced, not stacked next to the new one.

Analogy: the "About me" page. You do not add a second address when you move. You change the address, and maybe keep a note of the old one.

Episodic memory: what happened

Episodic memories are events with a time. "Maya planned a Lisbon trip the week of June 21, 2026." "Maya's dog Poppy had a vet checkup on March 14." They are useful for a while and then decay into noise. A dentist appointment from two years ago is not worth a slot in the prompt.

Analogy: a diary. Every entry is dated. You rarely reread the old ones, but you never rewrite them.

Procedural memory: how to behave

Procedural memories are standing instructions. "Answer short and direct." "Use metric units." They are not facts about the world; they are rules for the assistant. They are small, they never expire on their own, and the user should be able to edit them like settings.

Analogy: a habit. You do not think about it each time; it shapes every answer.

Why the split matters

The flavour decides the policy. This one table is most of the design:

Category	Expire?	On change	Injected when
semantic	never	supersede the old fact	relevant to the question
episodic	~90 days after last use	append a new event	relevant, with its date
procedural	never, user-editable	replace	always, they are cheap

Get the category wrong and you get the wrong policy. A birthday is a recurring date, so it is semantic, not episodic. A one-time trip is episodic. "Keep answers short" is procedural even though it sounds like a preference.

Where a rolling profile fits

Some systems keep a fourth thing: a short running profile of the user, a paragraph that says who they are. The BEAM paper's LIGHT framework calls this a scratchpad. It is not a replacement for the card file. It is a cheat sheet for the extractor, so that "she" in a new message resolves to "Maya" without a lookup. We treat it as optional and measure whether it pays for itself.

Closing

Short-term memory is the sticky note you throw away tonight. Long-term memory is the card file, and every card is a fact, an event, or a rule. The label on the card decides how long it lives and when it gets read.

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