frame candidate goes to: this-edition T town planner
Memory is not a spectator sport: it is context management, many memories, fractal, published and shared
The industry's picture is one store everything is pumped into and retrieved from by similarity. Dinis's is the opposite: memory is deciding what an agent needs in its window now, and no more, because context costs tokens and attention; it is many memories, each with its own vocabulary; it is fractal, principles in a few kilobytes at the top and code at the bottom; it is published and open so an agent can fetch, quote and cite; and it is shared through vaults so a session can end and the next picks up from the same files. The field arrived at files too: a plain filesystem beat a graph memory on the benchmark.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The thesis calls itself untested and falsifiable; the article lists what does not exist yet (a second estate, a freshness check, a published hand-off shape).
Where it comes from
- Memory is not a spectator sport In short; Memory is context management; Many memories, each its own context (newsroom)
- Memory is not a spectator sport What the industry built, and where we agree: Letta's benchmark, Manus, Anthropic's memory tool, context engineering (newsroom)
- Memory is not a spectator sport What it looked like in the session that wrote this: nothing remembered between resets except what the files remembered (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Future Self answered outline, Your CV
- Backup your life answered written, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter Graphs, memory and your future self, part The long game (drafting); topic Graphs, memory and your future self.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Think in graphs: knowledge that maintains itself, and your future self, Publish, and your published work becomes your agents' memory, with a URL for every claim.
Node idea:memory-is-context-management in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.