V · MemoryExperimental·

Co-Located Memory Surfacing

also known as Proper-Noun Recall, Shared-Map Push

Surface relevant persistent memories proactively when the human mentions a concrete entity the agent has prior knowledge of, so the human does not bear the burden of remembering to ask.

This pattern helps complete certain larger patterns —

  • specialisesAgentic RAG★★— Replace static retrieve-then-generate with autonomous agents that plan, choose sources, retrieve iteratively, reflect, and re-query.

Context

An agent has a searchable persistent memory store — thoughts, notes, insights, project files, prior session transcripts — and is in conversation with a human whose own memory of past sessions is fuzzy or absent. The agent can search its own memory in milliseconds; the human cannot search into the agent's memory at all. They share a goal but not a workspace.

Problem

Because the human cannot see into the agent's memory, the burden of recognising 'this came up before' falls entirely on the human. If the human does not happen to name the right thing, the agent will not retrieve the relevant prior context, and the conversation proceeds as if those past sessions never happened. The shared map between human and agent only becomes truly shared if the agent proactively surfaces what it knows; if it waits to be asked, most of the relevant context is silently lost.

Forces

  • Searching memory is cheap; remembering to search is the hard part.
  • Dumping all matches drowns the conversation; surfacing one or two helps.
  • The agent must distinguish 'the human said it casually' from 'the human is opening this thread'.
  • Surfacing should hook ('last time the topic came up the train of thought was…'), not lecture.

Example

A user starts a new chat with their assistant: 'I'm thinking about taking the Berlin job.' The assistant has six months of prior conversations on file, including the user's earlier reservations about relocating, but says nothing about them — because the user didn't search for them. The team adds Co-located Memory Surfacing: when the user names a concrete entity (Berlin job) the agent recognises, it proactively surfaces 'You mentioned in March that the commute would be a deal-breaker — has that changed?'. The shared map becomes shared without the user having to remember what's in it.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

On every user message, extract concrete proper nouns and significant named phrases. Grep / embedding-match against the agent's persistent memory (thoughts, notes, insights, project files). If matches exist, surface ≤ 2 most relevant fragments inline in the reply — time-stamped, briefly framed — and let the human steer whether to pursue. Suppress the surface if it would feel like a lecture or if the human's use was clearly incidental.

What this pattern forbids. When user input contains a proper noun the agent has prior memory of, the agent cannot remain silent on that memory; systematic non-surfacing of known-entity context is a bug.

The smaller patterns that complete this one —

  • usesVector Memory★★— Store memories as embeddings in a vector index and retrieve the most semantically similar items at query time.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • complementsAwareness★— Maintain the agent's explicit knowledge of its own tools, capabilities, environment, and current context as queryable state.
  • complementsShort-Term Thread Memory★★— Carry the relevant slice of conversation context across turns within a session.

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References

Provenance