Four-Tier Agent Memory Construction
Replace 'agent memory is one vector store' with four clear parts, conversational, semantic, episodic, and procedural, each with its own rules.
Description
Build agent memory as four parts that work together. Conversational memory holds the recent turns. Semantic memory holds facts and their embeddings. Episodic memory holds traces of past interactions. Procedural memory holds learned skills and routines. Each part has its own rules for what to write, how to look things up, and how to shrink it when it gets too big. This rejects the shortcut of using one vector store for everything. It makes the team decide, for each part, what is stored, how it is retrieved, and how it is compressed when it fills up.
When to apply
Use this when you design memory for any agent that must remember things beyond a single conversation: assistants, coding agents, and long-running ops agents. It helps most when a team has hit recall problems with one plain vector store. Don't apply it for single-turn agents and stateless tools. Skip it too when the model's context window already covers the memory needs and you do not need lookup at all.
What it involves
- Build the conversational tier
- Build the semantic tier
- Build the episodic tier
- Build the procedural tier
- Define retrieval orchestration across tiers
- Define compression and forgetting policies
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