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How agents work · Memory

Context & memory

The AI doesn't remember your life. It sees a window: your current conversation plus whatever files it just read. When the window's gone, the memory is gone — unless it's written down somewhere.

Context, in plain words

Context = everything the AI can see right now. Your message, the chat so far, attached files, open project files. That's it. If it's not in the window, the AI doesn't know it — no matter how many times you've said it in other chats.

Why the AI "forgot"

  • New chat = empty window. Yesterday's conversation isn't in it.
  • Long chat = the oldest parts fall out of the window.
  • "I told the other AI" = different tool, different window.

None of this is the AI being dumb. It's just what a window is.

Real memory is a file

The fix is simple: anything worth remembering goes in a file the AI can read next time. Your preferences, your project facts, your good prompts. That's the whole trick behind vaults — and it's why the playbooks install themselves as files instead of asking you to re-explain the job every time.

The habit

End sessions worth keeping with:

Copy this
Save what we decided and anything worth remembering to a notes
file in this folder, so a future session can pick up where we
left off.

Next: a vault for your agent

If this helped

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Next step: A vault for your agent