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points by ford 15 hours ago | 0 comments
I've found models to be terrible at creating useful memories, or doing anything incremental over time.

I am interested in if it's a fundamental limitation, ie models that have gaps that need to be corrected are going to be bad at recognizing those gaps, and leaving instructions to fix them. Or if models just aren't trained on this

It seems akin to my experience with coding agents, where models are good at implementation but not great at abstraction

[–] kingstnap 14 hours ago
I don't think its fundamental. It's just not trained well.

Firstly LLMs need to have more training on speaking to several different people.

Humans have a lot of training on interacting with many different individuals and LLMs feel extremely one thread chat heavy. Like if you read the entire thread the LLM langauge is usually consistent but if you send someone a partial artifact it feels disconnected in a broken way.

This includes their code changes and doc changes which inheret this lack of audience.

For the more general idea of keeping good artifacts for themselves I think an interesting idea would be to look into context language models instead of autoregressive ones.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37725

Context language models need to manage their own context to complete a task. (They see their own context as a file).

This naturally forces this innate ability of managing relevance.

[–] troupo 6 hours ago
> I don't think its fundamental. It's just not trained well.

It quite literally is fundamental. "memories" are just random .md files that literally cannot be loaded into context because of context limitations. Literally in the article:

--- 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

...

It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md

--- end quote ---

[–] grey-area 15 hours ago
The way we store memories is to adjust the weights in our brain (as far as we know). The way models store memories seems to be to write them down on a scratchpad someplace (details vary, but roughly this is what they're doing).

The article explicitly excludes this from consideration early on though:

By “agent memory,” we mean knowledge that Claude gains from experience...saved as context it can read later. It excludes other ways models can learn or manage context, such as changes to their weights

Those seem fundamentally different processes, and adjusting weights does seem a much better idea after all, but then in that world everyone has a different AI and how do you apply updates? For a company like Anthropic this is of course a big problem and that is probably why they don't like that route. Could we store weight deltas or something similar and reapply them over a different model?

[–] maxaw 3 hours ago
hmm - perhaps store all the interactions and replay them to new model?