Agent Context Management#

Agents are stateless by default. Every new session starts with a blank slate – no knowledge of previous conversations, past mistakes, or learned preferences. This is the fundamental problem of agent context management: how do you give an agent continuity without overwhelming its context window?

Types of Agent Memory#

Agent memory falls into four categories:

• Short-term memory: The current conversation. Lives in the context window, disappears when the session ends.
• Long-term memory: Facts persisted across sessions. “The production cluster runs Kubernetes 1.29.” Must be explicitly stored and retrieved.
• Episodic memory: Records of specific past events. “On Feb 15, we debugged a DNS failure caused by a misconfigured service name.” Useful for avoiding repeated mistakes.
• Semantic memory: General knowledge distilled from episodes. “Bitnami charts name resources using the release name directly.”

Most systems only implement short-term and long-term. Episodic and semantic memory require more infrastructure but provide significantly better performance over time.