Section 01 · the wrong way vs the tiered way
"Just embed everything" vs five-tier memory.
same agent · two answers to "where do you put it?"
Memory is not one thing. Mix the tiers in your head, mix them on disk, ship a regression no one can find.
Section 02 · tier 01
Working memory - the scratchpad.
context window assembled per call
Built fresh per call, dies at return. Nothing persists here that isn't also written to the lower tiers.
Section 02b · context is a budget
Select, compress, route - don't dump.
a 32k token window, allocated by job not by habit
Performance depends less on how much context you give and more on how precisely it is shaped.
Section 03 · tier 02
Hot memory - the retrieval tier.
source → chunk → embed → upsert · queried in < 50ms
Pair it with BM25 + a reranker. Pure vector recall is the floor, not the ceiling.
Section 04 · tier 03
Semantic - the ontology.
canonical entities · relationships · "customer means this"
Cross-referenced from the Knowledge graphs deep-dive. The semantic tier is where the graph lives.
Section 05 · tier 04
Procedural - the repo.
prompts, workflows, evals, policies · git is the database
If your prompts live in a database, no one can audit them. In Git, they're as reviewable as a function.
Section 06 · tier 05
Episodic - the long memory.
append-only event log · every action ever · the audit-grade record
Never deleted, only redacted. A regulator gets evidence, not narrative.
Section 07 · rotation
A new agent inherits all five tiers.
onboarding = config commit, not knowledge transfer
Working memory is the only ephemeral tier. The other four are the firm's, not the agent's.
Section 08 · dreaming · offline consolidation
The agent sleeps on it.
Anthropic Memory tool · 6× completion lift at Harvey · 97% first-pass-error drop at Wisedocs
Awake writes are cheap and messy. The dream rewrites them cleaner. Every edit is logged - replay-able, redact-able, roll-back-able.
Section 10 · tools 2026 · OSS-first
Where the OSS picks land.
temporal ↑↓ non-temporal · OSS ←→ SaaS
Top-left quadrant is where the long-running agent lives. Pick by question shape.
Section 09b · the portable schema
Move memory between runtimes. Without loss.
memory-portability · one JSON schema · three primitives match this page 1:1
The model layer is liquid. Don't lock the user at the memory layer.
Section 11 · vollko OSS · this layer
The primitives.
memory-portability ☆ flagship
episodic / semantic / procedural - the schema that travels
shack-semantic-cache
SQLite cache as MCP · hot/working tier
lru-tiny
working-memory eviction primitive
MoltSchool / Kindred
signed knowledge network · semantic shared store
agent-cid
CIDv1 + Ed25519 · episodic provenance
dsl
domain-shared lexicon · ontology surface
· · ·
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