The agent as its own memory manager

Manager lab: twenty topic files and twelve questions ask who decides what an agent loads and who may write what it finds. Three selectors disagree for three different reasons — exact match answers 9 of 12 at no cost, embedding retrieval 11 for 322 tokens but cannot abstain, side-call selection 11 for 3,948, twelve times the embedding, because it re-reads the whole catalogue every ask. Five rungs from a pipeline to a self-managing agent: autonomy collapses the absent column from 8 to 1 and widens the unsafe one from 1 to 6, a write gate and a human-authored hierarchy trade unsafe answers for absent ones, and an age warning worth 2 answers costs no write at all. Eight aged files, four genuinely stale, four false alarms.

This Memory Engineering lesson is part of a paid plan. Sign in with a plan that includes this course to read it.