Agent Memory, Made Clear — a 13-part course
Everything you need to understand — and launch a product around — memory in agentic and LLM systems: the types of memory, how memories are stored, retrieved, written, consolidated, and forgotten, how the leading systems (MemGPT/Letta, Mem0, Zep, LangGraph, ChatGPT, Claude) work inside, the optimization playbook, evaluation, and security. Built on fresh research (see plan.md for sources and the full plan).
Read in order — every part uses only what came before it. The one-page visual map of the whole series: memory-map.svg. Product ideas built on the series: products.md.
| # | Blog | You learn |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Why Agents Need Memory | The goldfish problem; weights vs context vs storage; write path + read path |
| 2 | Working Memory: The Context Window | Why “just use a bigger context” fails: it ends, it costs per call, it rots |
| 3 | The Four Types of Memory | Working / episodic / semantic / procedural — one event, four memories |
| 4 | Episodic Memory | Storing experiences; reflection; past successes as few-shot examples |
| 5 | Semantic Memory | Extraction; profile vs collection vs graph; the truth problem (ADD/UPDATE/DELETE/NOOP, validity intervals) |
| 6 | Procedural Memory | Standing instructions (CLAUDE.md), skill libraries (Voyager), self-editing with guardrails |
| 7 | Where Memories Live | Files, vector DBs (embeddings from zero), knowledge graphs, SQL — and why hybrids win |
| 8 | The Read Path | Automatic vs agent-driven retrieval; relevance+recency+importance scoring; reranking; injection |
| 9 | The Write Path | Selection; hot-path vs background vs sleep-time; consolidation pipeline; forgetting well |
| 10 | How Modern Systems Do It | MemGPT/Letta, Mem0, Zep/Graphiti, LangGraph, ChatGPT vs Claude vs Claude Code — compared |
| 11 | Context Engineering & Optimization | Token budgets, compaction, note-taking, sub-agents, prompt caching, the money math |
| 12 | Evaluating & Securing Memory | LoCoMo, LongMemEval, production metrics; memory poisoning attacks and the defense stack |
| 13 | The Blueprint: Build Your Own Memory Product | Staged architecture (MVP → advanced), decision checklists, killer pitfalls, the pitch |