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Chapter 12: Memory Management for Production Agents

Every agent we build in this book forgets. The Document Agent answers a question and starts fresh. The Incident Runbook Agent resolves an incident and loses the context. In production, this amnesia is the difference between a demo and a product.

What this chapter covers

  • Session memory -- surviving the context window with importance-weighted truncation and compaction
  • Long-term memory -- learning from corrections, avoiding repeated mistakes, two-pass retrieval
  • Shared memory -- multi-agent coordination with scoped state stores and optimistic concurrency
  • Production frameworks -- Mem0, Zep, and Letta compared with current benchmarks
  • Memory security -- poisoning attacks, validation, and the GDPR compliance tension
  • Learned forgetting -- when and how to retire memories that no longer serve

Code companion

The working code for this chapter is in src/ch12/:

  • session_memory.py -- Context management with importance scoring
  • long_term_memory.py -- Persistent memory with worthiness filtering
  • shared_memory.py -- Multi-agent state coordination

Get the full chapter

The complete chapter text is available in the book.

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