Definition

Agent Memory

Agent memory is everything competing for space in the context window. The book lists six kinds: system instructions, tool schemas, working memory for the current task, short-term conversation history, long-term memory across sessions, and retrieved context from RAG. Older messages get summarized with a cheap model. A 128K window can lose 22,000 tokens before the user asks anything, so curation is the hard problem, not storage.

Agent Memory diagram from Intelligence at Scale
Diagram from chapter 12, The Agent Toolbox

Explained in

Chapter 12: The Agent Toolbox

The protocols, tools, and infrastructure that make agents actually useful.

Related terms

This is one term. The chapter is the argument.

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