Agent memory is stuck where observability was before 2019
Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment
Coding agents now store what they remember in a dozen incompatible shapes: AGENTS.md files, Anthropic's memory tool, GitHub Copilot's repo facts, Mem0, Graphiti, LangGraph stores, and more. None can read the others, so a lesson learned by one tool is invisible to the next. LoreKit's author argues the fix isn't another tool but a shared agreement on data model, conventions, protocol, and conformance tests, the way OpenTelemetry settled observability, and sketches what one memory record might look like.
The problem isn't a missing tool. It's a missing agreement, and that only comes from the community working on it together.
- armchairhacker
Is this a significant problem? It seems like there are 15 solutions to every AI “text format” problem, but all are merely structure over feeding the AI informal English, structure which I believe the “transformer” model is specifically able to strip to a common form (which is how training it on the entire internet worked).
AI does benefit from learning to use skills, and being instructed with good structures (like “save [specific important kind of detail] in memories” and “plan before implementing anything”). But none of these memory solutions seem better than any other, they’re basically just different folders. Your CLAUDE.md can say “see AGENTS.md” and AGENTS.md can say “write memories to .agent/memories/“, and I’d be interested in a measurement, but I assume it performs almost the exact same as native CLAUDE.md and .claude/memories.
One thing I’ve noticed AI does much better than me, is not have OCD over the “perfect” solution.
- Dirak
No it doesn’t. There’s still a lot of innovation / change happening in the LLM space, and no solution is one size fits all. AFAICT, solutions have to trade off across 3 primary concerns: speed, accuracy, and cost. I don’t even think memory as files is even set in stone yet. There’s so much innovation and progress to be made in this space.
- speedping
Entire blog post reeks of LLM.
If there was an adequately reliable way of detecting LLM text i'd build a browser extension that would just filter it out altogether.
- Fordec
On the general premise, I agree. But I don't think that moment is today, not yet anyway. I don't think we understand the right way to approach context and memory yet or how long they should last for, never mind standardizing on an abstraction prematurely that ends up being like SOAP or SGML.
- baalimago
Do we really need this..? What LLMs do well is interpret natural language. So it's a sponge for whatever format is used in a specific project: a predefined format is not really needed.
Besides, do we really want memory of user A's agents to co-exist with memory of user B? Not really. So the argument for collaboration and sharing is quite slim, at least for coding agents. The repository specific context can be encoded into a docs/ or architecture/ directory, just like it's been done pre-agent times as well.
For monitoring deployed agents: maybe. For this I built (yet another) memory management tool slivingdoc.dev, with this it's possible to pull down the durable context of all agents. But here the problem is a distributed system one, not format of the memories.
- imgyuri
The 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.
- palijer
It's too early to advocate for standardization for this problem. Otel developed after decades of experience in the field and we explored countless solutions and drew from them when developing Otel.
Saying we've explored enough in agent memory solutions right now enough to standardize it and add friction to any further experimentations would be an error I think.
- anuptalwalkar
Its a solution trying to find a problem. Memory, and in-fact entire storage layer needs to be invisible for agents and daily workloads. Nobody is building/selling agents for their amazing storage, but what can they do with it.
Nobody is building agents for memory, but they are building on top of it. you make solutions simplify themselves so that users can focus on actual business problems, nothing more.
Small plug- I have been running https://github.com/Polign/recall in a few production workflows, and most I hear about is, that it just works.