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points by bbor 19 hours ago | 0 comments
Reading such a passionate take as someone who has looked up is a strange experience, I must admit. Kinda like how the Bernard twist in S01 of Westworld felt. I'll try to respond as substantively as I can, regardless:

  That Claude rarely, if ever, actually "remembers". Since these are just random markdown files randomly injected into the tiny context.
Complaining about your anecdotal experiences with Claude(Code, hopefully?) isn't a serious criticism, the markdown files are optimized to not be random, and calling 1,000,000 tokens of context "tiny" seems like a plainly unreasonable bar. How much of War and Peace can you hold in your head at once and quote flawlessly, and is it more than 133%?

  What a useless experiment
The experiment is testing their fixes to the problem you lamented just one sentence prior.

  Define "effectively"
They do exactly that in figure 3, as mentioned at the end of the sentence you're quoting. Opus 5 used that advice to raise its benchmark score by 46.8%, and Opus 4.7 used it for a gain of 82.7%. The specific benchmark looks far from trivial, too: https://github.com/pgasawa/continual-learning-bench/tree/mai...

  Then it's not "memory". It's just telling the model to read a text/spec file before implementing something
It fits the colloquial definition, and there is no specific scientific definition in CogSci, CogPsych, Neuro, CogNeuro, NeuroPsych, nor philosophy. There's lots of useful ones offered in different contexts, but they differ considerably.[1] Regardless, it's well accepted industry jargon at this point: it doesn't matter in the same way that it doesn't matter than databases can never truly be "queried" because they can't engage in linguistic discourse.

  So, random injection of random things into context that depend on whether the short ToC entries have any relevance on what Claude is doing
Isn't this inevitably, undeniably true of any possible memory system, just from, say, a big-O perspective? If you have to persist every item in a list to decide which one is relevant enough to load into the same pool of memory, there's no point in the second step anymore.

  What is this bloated article about?
This article is very plausibly wrong, misguided, or even philosophically bankrupt, but I don't see any support for the claim that its topic is unclear. It's discussing the efficacy of proactive state management during idle periods for longrunning LLM-backed agents.

---

[1]: For example, did you know that modern CogSci is generally convinced that memories are illusions that the brain creates through a process that merely consults ineffable underlying representations (usually), and not an object retrieved from storage? That definition would also contradict Anthropic's wording here, but only in a way that weakens your criticism rather than supports it.

[–] troupo 19 hours ago
> Reading such a passionate take as someone who has looked up is a strange experience, I must admit.

There's nothing passionate. Calling bullshit for what it is is not passionate, and we need more of calling out.

I would say that you are much more passionate about this and have a prior bias that makes you see something that's not there in Anthropic's marketing materials

> Complaining about your anecdotal experiences with Claude(Code, hopefully?) isn't a serious criticism

Dismissing actual real-life user experience that anyone who's ever dealt with Claude Code as "anecdotal experience" is exactly why these self-congratulatory articles exist. Even if they mention exactly these issues in passing.

> and calling 1,000,000 tokens of context "tiny" seems like a plainly unreasonable bar.

It is both tiny and easily polluted. Its training data will easily override any and all data in the context even early on in the session. And yes, that million token context is still incapable of maintaining and recalling any of the "memories" with any consistency. Which the article itself acknowledges.

> The experiment is testing their fixes to the problem you lamented just one sentence prior.

These experiments are useless because they invent a problem and valiantly find solutions for it never measuring whether it has any actual impact in real life.

So what if new way of writing summaries is marginally better than the old way? It doesn't matter if the only way to make Claude reliably use them is to explicitly tell it to read them?

> It fits the colloquial definition, and there is no specific scientific definition in CogSci, CogPsych, Neuro, CogNeuro, NeuroPsych, nor philosophy

Here are your biases showing. Anthropic calls random markdown files "memories" and you immediately take them at their word.

These are not memories. These are objectively random markdown files whose only existence is assured by random harness injections and whatever claude retains in its current context from the first 200 lines of an injected ToC.

Yes, it's an accepted industry jargon, but you don't have to behave that it does something else than what it does.

Or that explicitly telling Claude "read a specific markdown file in your memory" is in any way, shape, or form different from "read a specific markdown file in specs directory".

Of course it's the only way to make Claude actually read and act on it.

> It's discussing the efficacy of proactive state management during idle periods for longrunning LLM-backed agents.

No. No it doesn't. It considers "components of agent memory" and focuses solely on "how we can write markdown files", and spends probably less than 1% on "how we can make sure the agent actually uses them". Even the conclusion completely ignores it despite this:

--- start quote ---

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 [1 000 000 tokens of context is huge lol - troupo]

...

It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md [but we sure love the sound of our voice deacribing how well it can write the hundreds of tiny files – troupo]

--- end quote ---

[–] nzjrs 16 hours ago
Very good reply.
[–] bbor 2 hours ago

  There's nothing passionate. Calling bullshit for what it is is not passionate, and we need more of calling out.
...you reacted to this blogpost by calling it "bullshit" and "bloated", and criticizing it with obvious hyperbole ("random markdown files randomly injectect into the tiny context", "15000th note", "dozens of times before", "useless experiment", "random injection").

You're allowed to feel emotion -- that wasn't a refutation. But denying that you indeed are typing with responding seems plainly obstinate, sorry. Again I will do my best to respond in line with the rules of this forum, even if I don't feel the same grace being given in return.

  I would say that you are much more passionate
What makes you say that? Because I disagree? A comment starting with "I'll try to reply as substantively as I can" isn't exactly firey, much less one that makes pain to cede ground and offer friendly offramps to the polemics.

  Dismissing actual real-life user experience
Well I have positive actual real-life user experience with these products. It seems we're at an impasse, there! 1-1=0, after all. This is why anecdotal evidence isn't valid, generally speaking.

  It is both tiny and easily polluted
This just comes down to "nuh-uh". So: yeah-huh! 133% of War and Peace is a lot of text to hold at the forefront of one's mind simultaneously.

   that million token context is still incapable of maintaining and recalling any of the "memories" with any consistency. Which the article itself acknowledges.
That's the exact opposite of the findings of the experiment that you yourself quoted: achieving an 82% improvement on a challenging benchmark without detailed instructions for memory use is in no sense "incapable".

  Here are your biases showing. Anthropic calls random markdown files "memories" and you immediately take them at their word.
You're not taking the time to read what I'm writing :( "It fits the colloquial definition" objectively isn't taking Anthropic "at their word". On an absolute, undeniable, factual level, this attempted ad-hominem is based on a faulty premise.

  These are not memories. These are objectively random markdown files
What are memories, and why does text stored in a computer "objectively" not fit that definition? Even if you offered one now (which, again, would be scientifically unsound), it'd be too late; it's beyond obvious that this reasoning is a-posteriori.

  Yes, it's an accepted industry jargon, but you don't have to behave that it does something else than what it does.
How am I doing that, specifically? You're the one taking issue with the industry jargon, and I offered no description of "what it does" in the first place, much less one that conflicts with some singular objective definition of "memory" (which, again, does not exist).

  Of course it's the only way to make Claude actually read and act on it.
This is objectively incorrect on an empirical level, as proven in the article we are commenting under.

  No. No it doesn't. It considers "components of agent memory" and focuses solely on "how we can write markdown files", and spends probably less than 1% on "how we can make sure the agent actually uses them". Even the conclusion completely ignores it
A) The desciption I gave does not require this arbitrary focus of yours.

B) Again, every single empirical result in the entire paper relies on the mechanism that you find to be non-existent.

[–] surgical_fire 10 hours ago
... And this second reply proves my point to your original take.

The guy you are responding to engaged with that article as it had any merit. Even brings up concepts from psychology as if the misuse of the term "memory" by Anthropic was related to actual memory as would be defined in other fields.

I wonder if the excessive usage of AI damaged people's brains enough that they abandoned curiosity and the ability to read things critically, or of they already lacked those things already in the first place.

[–] bbor 2 hours ago
1. Please don't assume people on the internet are men.

2. "You must only think that because you've abandoned curioisity, can't think critically, and have brain damage that's your own fault" is absurdly polemic. If I took your opinion seriously at all, I'd be quite offended.