Memory Management

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_memory/:

• 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.

Get the book on Amazon