Posted by geoffbp 15 hours ago
It explained that unlike Chat, each project in Claude Code creates memory files in ~/.claude/projects/[project path]/memory/ with notes about both the project and my impromptu directives or instructions, and a MEMORY.md index file that's loaded for every new session. It told me that my current project - which has been going on for a while - has 61 files in its memory, so it suggested that now in fact would be a good time to clean them up. Perfect.
It gave some examples of things things it has memorized: Apparently I once told it to always capitalize the first letter after a colon. I don't remember doing that, but hey, that's basic English grammar, dammit, so I can see myself getting pissy about it. It had saved that bit of petulance on my part in the memory.
That's great, but it was saved only in the memory folder of that project. This is good to know! I hadn't realized that stuff wasn't saved globally. Or rather, I vaguely remember turning that option off at some point and now I'm realizing that means I need to do some maintenance manually if I don't want to have to constantly remind Claude to capitalize properly, (and to always refer to me as Mr. Big.)
Definitely a good article for me to read right now.
It's definitely not correct UK English grammar. TIL that the US uses some very odd colon rules.
It's AP Style, which is used in basically every news article you've ever read.
The rule is simple: You capitalize the first word after a colon when it begins a full sentence.
Also, please try to be less dismissive!
> By “agent memory,” we mean knowledge that Claude gains from experience—including interactions with users and tasks it’s been assigned—and that it retains between sessions, saved as context it can read later.
That Claude rarely, if ever, actually "remembers". Since these are just random markdown files randomly injected into the tiny context.
"I'm sorry, I'll make a note of it" and will proceed to write a 15000th note with the same content it's already written dozens of times before
> We compared the memory folders from one run each of Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Fable 5, when each was about 10,000 steps into the game.
What a useless experiment
> That general guidance was enough for Opus 4.7 and Opus 5 to use memory effectively
Define "effectively"
> In this case, prompting Claude to read its memory files before answering—and then to explicitly test its theories—nearly doubled its benchmark score
Then it's not "memory". It's just telling the model to read a text/spec file before implementing something
> Claude doesn’t load all of its auto memory into every session’s context window. It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
So, random injection of random things into context that depend on whether the short ToC entries have any relevance on what Claude is doing, and which will be ignored.
And you have to explicitly tell the agent to read specific files otherwise it will ignore them.
What is this bloated article about?
Advertisement. As you correctly parsed, this article was vapid and full of fluff.
Why they write this? Probably as a vehicle to keep up word of mouth amongst software engineers; as we can see in this thread there's no shortage of people to engage with this crap as it had some merit. I can totally see this making the rounds on LinkedIn in search of engagement.
That I had to scroll to the bottom of the thread to find this is interesting, and says something about the general quality of comment section nowadays.
That Claude rarely, if ever, actually "remembers". Since these are just random markdown files randomly injected into the tiny context.
What a useless experiment
Define "effectively"
Then it's not "memory". It's just telling the model to read a text/spec file before implementing something
So, random injection of random things into context that depend on whether the short ToC entries have any relevance on what Claude is doing
What is this bloated article about?
---
[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.
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 ---
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.