[threecheese]

They are imo over-relying on Claude automemory here, which is terrible at contextualizing memory access and makes huge leaps that don’t make sense - except when it’s actually useful, which makes the problem even worse for an operator who can’t see the thinking process anymore.

Yes, I worked on a related project, no I don’t want you to use those memories to make assumptions which emerge as decisions that I didn’t want. With reasoning traces hidden, I am sometimes not even sure if it used those memories or just independently decided that PCI-DSS subsection-whatever is somehow relevant to this PR that has the word “credit”.

There is no way for me to fully configure memory preferences at a granularity which would be useful, and so I continue to use context files (and other tools, sometimes) to ensure the right memories are stored and surfaced at the right times.

There’s a lot of room for agent memory improvement across the ecosystem, and I don’t think the LLM providers should try to own this vertical slice. This will never happen though, because it makes us “sticky”.

Or maybe I’m holding it wrong.

[pavlov]

A CLAUDE.md file has no moat, it can be read by other agents.

Automemory can be weaved into the product in ways that make it harder to switch.

This is a company that's looking to IPO soon at a trillion+ dollar valuation, and they need to pull every lever to keep the users they got during the past year's boom.

[jwr]

Those auto memories are also annoying because by default they are not version controlled and land in a secret location. I much prefer storing stuff in a version controlled `CLAUDE.md` file.

[mattmanser]

Or shared across colleagues.

It's an insane way of managing what is essentially configuration in this day and age, literally throwing away all our hard-earned lessons of the last 3 decades.

Worse still, it'll just use it randomly, and you have to notice it's done it.

"The user never wants to use ORDER BY Timestamp, I'll add this as a memory"

"For this object, JUST FOR THIS OBJECT! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"

[chickensong]

I don't like the memories, but I value them. I do a regular sweep of the memories, extract to harness or docs, then delete them.

[fractorial]

I’ve rolled a small program to enforce consistency, lint rules, and human-authored files for Claude Memory.

It’s insanely powerful when doing by a human 100%. It’s conversely harmful when an agent manages it. There’s several papers about how LLM-managed memory is unequivocally terrible.

[stefangordon]

Indeed. I find it quite bizarre that just about the only thing the LLM appears incapable of doing is writing appropriate instructions for an LLM - whether it be memories, sub agent prompts, planning documents.

[madduci]

I believe this is a move to make user spent even much more tokens