Agents & Tool Use
Agent Memory Architectures
An agent whose only memory is its context window is amnesiac between sessions; persistent memory is the architecture that decides what to keep, where, and how to retrieve it.
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The context window is RAM, not disk. Everything an agent "knows" mid-task lives in a buffer that is wiped when the session ends and is too small to hold a long history anyway (see context-windows-long-context). An agent with no memory beyond its window restarts every conversation as a stranger and forgets what it learned three steps ago once the transcript grows. Memory architecture is the set of choices that fixes this: what to persist, where to store it, and how to pull the right piece back into the window at the right moment. It is retrieval (see retrieval-augmented-generation) applied to the agent's own experience rather than to a document corpus.
A taxonomy of memory
The clearest framing comes from the CoALA framework, which gives a language agent modular memory components by analogy to cognitive architecture:
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