Part 2 — The Taxonomy of Machine Memory

This section maps the kinds of memory an agent can have — working, episodic, semantic, procedural, and more — so you can design storage and retrieval around what each type is for.

What you will learn

  • The core memory types used in agent systems and how they differ
  • How scope, structure, and time change what a memory means
  • Why one memory type is never enough for real products
  • How memory types map to different storage and query requirements

Chapters in this section

There are 20 chapters in this part. Open any chapter to read it on its own, or work through them in order.

  1. 1 Working Memory: The Live Context Window
  2. 2 Episodic Memory: Recording What Happened
  3. 3 Semantic Memory: Storing What Is True
  4. 4 Procedural Memory: Encoding What Works
  5. 5 Reflective and Meta-Memory: Memory About Memory
  6. 6 Short-Term vs Long-Term Memory in Agent Systems
  7. 7 Declarative vs Non-Declarative Memory, Borrowed from Cognitive Science
  8. 8 Shared Memory vs Private Memory
  9. 9 Bounded Memory vs Unbounded Memory
  10. 10 Structured Facts vs Unstructured Narrative Memory
  11. 11 Scoped Memory: Per-User, Per-Session, Per-Project
  12. 12 Temporal Memory: Representing Change Over Time
  13. 13 Profile Memory vs Event Memory
  14. 14 Preference Memory: A Special Case of Semantic Memory
  15. 15 Summary Memory vs Atomic Fact Memory
  16. 16 Tool-Use Memory: Remembering How, Not Just What
  17. 17 Cross-Session Memory vs Cross-Conversation Memory
  18. 18 Multi-Modal Memory: Beyond Text
  19. 19 Why One Memory Type Is Never Enough
  20. 20 Mapping Memory Types to Storage Requirements