- Author
- Kevin Liao
- Published
- 3 October 2026, updated 5 October
- Kind
- Personal blog post, introducing the author's tool
- Original
- liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory
- Subject
- File-based agent memory
- Themes
- What lasts
What it is
Kevin Liao argues that memory plugins solve the wrong problem. The post says agents should read and maintain documentation instead. The post introduces Liao's own tool, Operator Memory, as the alternative.
What it says
- Liao describes memory plugins as RAG. Snippets go into a vector database, and top matches are injected.
- It lists five problems: similarity ranking, lost context, stale truth, unknown unknowns and unauditable stores.
- Documents should cover what code cannot show, such as requirements, decisions and constraints.
- A lean catalog loads at session start, and the agent opens the rest when needed.
- The working agent should write documents while it has full context, not a background agent.
- Facts should be rewritten when they change, never appended.
What evidence it gives
The post reports no controlled tests. Figures such as 1,000 snippets and 80k tokens of exploration are illustrations or estimates. Liao describes about a year of personal use, starting in August 2025.
Interests and limits
Liao builds Operator Memory, so the case is not neutral. Liao says it is free and open source. Liao admits sometimes having to step in to create, rewrite or trim documents. Liao also says most agents will not split or consolidate documents unprompted.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- A spec the agent can't run isn't a spec yet. Liao has the working agent write its own documents. Lewis says anything an agent writes mid-task grades itself generously. Together they raise a question: which memory should an agent be unable to edit?
- Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss. Liao says stale snippets survive because retrieval ranks by similarity, not currency. Hinte and colleagues find fat cells keeping obesity-linked marks after weight loss. Memory can outlast the reason for it. Neither system seems able to mark an entry as outdated.