alt Hacker NewsThe need for a unified format or spec is greatly reduced in the case of Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats. Even if such instructions did not exist, agents are extremely good at traversing files to get the necessary context it needs.
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> Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats.
Only it's not read by agents, and largely ignored.
From Anthropic's recent self-congratulatory article:
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Injected memories use up valuable tokens, and an incorrect note can be carried into every session. Loading a note also doesn’t guarantee that Claude acts on it: our documentation on Claude Code warns that longer instruction files reduce adherence
...
It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
https://www.anthropic.com/research/components-of-agent-memor...
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This is true and it probably is actually fine, but in a way you don't want it to be wasting its reasoning abilities and context window on figuring out which text files to read.
It would be like trying to accomplish something as a human but all your reference material is always in a different format, it would be maddening.