I have a skill called memory-prune whose sole purpose is to take an automatically created memory, assess whether it deserves to live, get stored in code comments, a rule, an AGENTS.md file in the project, the global AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md file, or (and this is the most often picked option) not at all and deleted.
I’d be interested if you could share this skill please. Always looking to improve memory management which so often gets unwieldy when left to its own devices
Hmm, this is kind of like memory consolidation for recall. I wonder if it would be equally/more effective if you kept the memory in place and made automated pointers to the memory items (recall pointers) in the codebase files that inject the memory into agent context if the pointers ever appear in tool results.
So far I've turned off automatic memory creation in every harness I've used. Claude Code sometimes creates some anyway, and I probably delete 95% of them. The memories it creates are almost always relevant only to the specific task that it is currently working on. If it's a task I'll need to do again, then yeah, maybe that's useful. But that isn't the case most of the time, so I delete them to avoid cluttering context.
So the main improvement to memories I'd like to see is better judgment on which ones to create.
The parts about "dreaming" make me think of how agent transcripts contain a ton of information, which I think is currently under-utilized. I'll repeat advice I've seen here a few times: ingest your own transcripts into duckdb (claude code will build that pipeline in about 10 minutes) and do some data analysis on them. Some ideas if you don't know where to start: look at tool call failures to see if you can prevent common ones, check out if you have large cache misses and what causes them, look at various efficiency metrics over time (tokens per $, lines of code per tokens, etc.) with main thread vs sub-agents, etc. I started with this sort of things, and ended up following some threads to interesting insights. For example, I found indications that I tended to make Opus 5.5 / Sol 6.1 divide their work into units that were too small. They have the capacity to work on more stuff at once than older models, and I wasn't really taking advantage of that.
> Claude Code sometimes creates some anyway, and I probably delete 95% of them.
The thing you're asking it for might be intent, which is something the technology fundamentally lacks.
Which.. is something that has been discussed very extensively, which makes one wonder why Anthropic still keeps trying to push that square peg through a round hole.
This article is a lot of validation for what I am building. I'll definitely be revisiting the article a few times to take in the ideas. Memory systems in AIs are extremely important and imho you can do much better than simply training the base model for memory management.
Great article -- still have some sections to read, but it's just too much to read. Emotionally, that is.
Part of me feels the pang of regret and shame seeing so many little details I researched and dreamed[1] (ha!) of prototyping ~2.5y ago expressed and validated so cleanly. Obviously A) I never did get the prototype working nor publish the underlying ideas and B) this blog post (paper? ...plog post?) is building on it at a scale and with quality I could never dream of (fig. 3 is especially striking), not to mention all the new ideas mixed in. Still... sharing cause it helps, I think, and because I expect y'all can relate; if you're old enough, it's very similar to the feeling you get when you think about how much Apple stock you could've bought in the 90s.
Anyway, more materially:
1. Pretty interesting to see Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Opus 5 tied on the basic memory test (aforementioned fig. 3); the Opus comparison alone seems to imply either a hard plateau or that 5.5's huge improvements were accomplished by making good practices more likely, but the Sonnet detail throws that for a loop... I suppose the plateau explanation isn't contradicted, so maybe that's right (for this benchmark).
2. Fig. 4 is gonna do rounds on Reddit and Twitter, my god. Pretty stellar, intuitive depiction of the Mythos step-change that enabled true agentic engineering for the first time this summer! The highlighting is also just the right amount of facetious; love it.
3. Pretty bummed to see no followup philosophy references. We know you have them, Anthropic nerds! Do not be ashamed of the soft and slippery.
4. I am now reminded that I knew they were trying dreaming at scale, as I'm actually on the waitlist for it! And that backs up my overall takeway, actually: I can't help but feel like they're either A) vastly underestimating the amount of CogSci literature that could help them go beyond the "dreaming is when you think in your offtime" paradigm, or B) not sharing their real learnings.
Today's RSI announcement and the final sentence of this seminal plog post being a pitch for enterprise customers supports the latter, I think. That's ostensibly a good thing from a societal stability perspective, but I can't help but feel left out -- not to mention paralyzed by fear of the known unknown...
That "I never got to finish" feeling is the absolute worst. I've been struggling with it for years, and I feel like understand ya here.
It absolutely sucks you feel that, and I hope you find some comfort soon, however it may come.
If you're looking for a "so what now?" Moment, there's only one thing I can say that I've been proselytizing a bit: share everything. All the time. And get people to look at it and be your hype person; and if you're not getting that in your friend ground or workplace or community, find a new one to add to.
The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
You've done nothing wrong. You're just with some other folks like us that don't have the same die rolling power.
Don't give up on your ideas. Don't stop experimenting. Make your own tools because it's for you, and maybe your dice will come up that you get the other person in the world that sees it and goes "yes!" And you get all the fancy posts and stars and attention and such. Because that feeling of validation - not just popularity, but acceptance and being seen and heard for one's craft - is one everyone seeks and needs in life. It's not a weakness. It's being a human.
Thank you for sharing your experience with internet strangers.
> The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
Many of us have ideas, ideas are cheap. Executing a complex idea well from thought to completion is much more rare.
That's kinda the point, right? Ideas are cheap, so companies can afford to buy 1000 humans worth of ideas to try and particle collider them together. Execution is rarely one person sitting in a room and pressing buttons and things change.
So my thought about sharing and not thinking about "my secret sauce" anymore is just necessary. Share what you think your cool flavor of an idea is, someone else can groove on it, and maybe you and them will grow it into something more.
A major problem as I see it is kinda geek-class-warfare coming to a head. So much of my personal and anecdotally collected experience from others is essentially being locked out of knowledge and ideation because a "upper geek class" decided that they were not worthy of having their idea shared, specifically because that class thought they could make money from it, or because they were insular for some other in group reason. That meant good ideas that just needed a single word or connecting bridge from one topic to another ended up withering, and mediocre ideas ended up being accelerated because of just sheer populace force.
And that just makes people feel bad. Someone working for 2 1/2 years on an idea that just happens to come out on the Internet is not going to feel good. It's going to make them feel invalidated, it's going to make them feel exhausted, it's going to make them feel like they didn't do enough. When it's just not the case.
Anyway. I just wanted to say something to this as well, because it's sort of just dismisses a person's ideas. I don't think you're intentionally doing that, but even repeating the phrase, "ideas are cheap" cheapens what it actually takes to come up with an idea. And now in 2026, when literally any idea can become something real, I really don't think ideas being cheap means ideas aren't valuable.
I may have been too loose with my wording. Lots of people can come up with concepts and ideas. Everyone used to have an idea for an app back when it was cool, I thought about location based dating apps maybe 5-10 years before they became a thing. I'm certain there were at least a few hundred thousand people if not more who had a similar idea - that's what I meant, that's the cheap part. Actually working late nights or even quitting your job to implement the idea, or having the right network and social skills to make it happen - that part is rare. Even today with agents it's still hard and rare to create a profitable business.
So we weren't talking about the same thing.
> And that just makes people feel bad. Someone working for 2 1/2 years on an idea that just happens to come out on the Internet is not going to feel good
This was more than an idea for you and more than a hobbey at least according to my definitions of those terms. I'd call it a passion research / early stage business venture depending on how much effort you put into it and what your intentions for it were.
So after reading the article, I asked a Claude Code session I'm working in at the moment about its memory and whether it needs to "dream" to reorganize itself because I honestly wasn't sure what it was doing about it.
It explained that unlike Chat, each project in Claude Code creates memory files in ~/.claude/projects/[project path]/memory/ with notes about both the project and my impromptu directives or instructions, and a MEMORY.md index file that's loaded for every new session. It told me that my current project - which has been going on for a while - has 61 files in its memory, so it suggested that now in fact would be a good time to clean them up. Perfect.
It gave some examples of things things it has memorized: Apparently I once told it to always capitalize the first letter after a colon. I don't remember doing that, but hey, that's basic English grammar, dammit, so I can see myself getting pissy about it. It had saved that bit of petulance on my part in the memory.
That's great, but it was saved only in the memory folder of that project. This is good to know! I hadn't realized that stuff wasn't saved globally. Or rather, I vaguely remember turning that option off at some point and now I'm realizing that means I need to do some maintenance manually if I don't want to have to constantly remind Claude to capitalize properly, (and to always refer to me as Mr. Big.)
Definitely a good article for me to read right now.
Another day, another Anthropic marketing article trying to deceive people into believing Claude is conscious. Absolutely insane anybody takes this company seriously when they describe "writing notes into an .md file to be re-injected into context later" as ""dreaming"".
Dreaming is being used here as an analogy for a post-hoc conflict resolution process for memory (which is part of the theorized purpose of dreaming in the human brain), rather than used literally. I think it's the best word to describe what it does and it is very important to a good memory system, as memory conflicts are one of the most likely things pulling down their performance in the long run. Not really a misnomer, imo, and i don't think they are trying to use the word to suggest that Claude is conscious.
> post-hoc conflict resolution process for memory (which is part of the theorized purpose of dreaming in the human brain)
That’s not accurate. One leading hypothesis is that the experience of dreaming is a side effect of memory processing and consolidation[1]. Using the name of a side effect to describe the process that produces it is misleading, and at best it goes well beyond what’s actually known.
[1] “The process of memory reactivation and consolidation in the sleeping brain appears to influence conscious experience during sleep, contributing to dream content recalled on awakening.” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4704085/
Such a bullshit article, as much of Anthropic "research" is these days.
> By “agent memory,” we mean knowledge that Claude gains from experience—including interactions with users and tasks it’s been assigned—and that it retains between sessions, saved as context it can read later.
That Claude rarely, if ever, actually "remembers". Since these are just random markdown files randomly injected into the tiny context.
"I'm sorry, I'll make a note of it" and will proceed to write a 15000th note with the same content it's already written dozens of times before
> We compared the memory folders from one run each of Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Fable 5, when each was about 10,000 steps into the game.
What a useless experiment
> That general guidance was enough for Opus 4.7 and Opus 5 to use memory effectively
Define "effectively"
> In this case, prompting Claude to read its memory files before answering—and then to explicitly test its theories—nearly doubled its benchmark score
Then it's not "memory". It's just telling the model to read a text/spec file before implementing something
> Claude doesn’t load all of its auto memory into every session’s context window. It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
So, random injection of random things into context that depend on whether the short ToC entries have any relevance on what Claude is doing, and which will be ignored.
And you have to explicitly tell the agent to read specific files otherwise it will ignore them.
I have a skill called memory-prune whose sole purpose is to take an automatically created memory, assess whether it deserves to live, get stored in code comments, a rule, an AGENTS.md file in the project, the global AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md file, or (and this is the most often picked option) not at all and deleted.
I’d be interested if you could share this skill please. Always looking to improve memory management which so often gets unwieldy when left to its own devices
Hmm, this is kind of like memory consolidation for recall. I wonder if it would be equally/more effective if you kept the memory in place and made automated pointers to the memory items (recall pointers) in the codebase files that inject the memory into agent context if the pointers ever appear in tool results.
So far I've turned off automatic memory creation in every harness I've used. Claude Code sometimes creates some anyway, and I probably delete 95% of them. The memories it creates are almost always relevant only to the specific task that it is currently working on. If it's a task I'll need to do again, then yeah, maybe that's useful. But that isn't the case most of the time, so I delete them to avoid cluttering context.
So the main improvement to memories I'd like to see is better judgment on which ones to create.
The parts about "dreaming" make me think of how agent transcripts contain a ton of information, which I think is currently under-utilized. I'll repeat advice I've seen here a few times: ingest your own transcripts into duckdb (claude code will build that pipeline in about 10 minutes) and do some data analysis on them. Some ideas if you don't know where to start: look at tool call failures to see if you can prevent common ones, check out if you have large cache misses and what causes them, look at various efficiency metrics over time (tokens per $, lines of code per tokens, etc.) with main thread vs sub-agents, etc. I started with this sort of things, and ended up following some threads to interesting insights. For example, I found indications that I tended to make Opus 5.5 / Sol 6.1 divide their work into units that were too small. They have the capacity to work on more stuff at once than older models, and I wasn't really taking advantage of that.
> Claude Code sometimes creates some anyway, and I probably delete 95% of them.
The thing you're asking it for might be intent, which is something the technology fundamentally lacks.
Which.. is something that has been discussed very extensively, which makes one wonder why Anthropic still keeps trying to push that square peg through a round hole.
I just periodically ask it to curate all memory, and ask me questions to do so.
And in the Claude Desktop UI I manually curate the memories.
Works well enough, I don’t like the concept of dreaming as it quickly leads to memory bloat and/or outdated stuff.
This article is a lot of validation for what I am building. I'll definitely be revisiting the article a few times to take in the ideas. Memory systems in AIs are extremely important and imho you can do much better than simply training the base model for memory management.
Great article -- still have some sections to read, but it's just too much to read. Emotionally, that is.
Part of me feels the pang of regret and shame seeing so many little details I researched and dreamed[1] (ha!) of prototyping ~2.5y ago expressed and validated so cleanly. Obviously A) I never did get the prototype working nor publish the underlying ideas and B) this blog post (paper? ...plog post?) is building on it at a scale and with quality I could never dream of (fig. 3 is especially striking), not to mention all the new ideas mixed in. Still... sharing cause it helps, I think, and because I expect y'all can relate; if you're old enough, it's very similar to the feeling you get when you think about how much Apple stock you could've bought in the 90s.
Anyway, more materially:
1. Pretty interesting to see Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Opus 5 tied on the basic memory test (aforementioned fig. 3); the Opus comparison alone seems to imply either a hard plateau or that 5.5's huge improvements were accomplished by making good practices more likely, but the Sonnet detail throws that for a loop... I suppose the plateau explanation isn't contradicted, so maybe that's right (for this benchmark).
2. Fig. 4 is gonna do rounds on Reddit and Twitter, my god. Pretty stellar, intuitive depiction of the Mythos step-change that enabled true agentic engineering for the first time this summer! The highlighting is also just the right amount of facetious; love it.
3. Pretty bummed to see no followup philosophy references. We know you have them, Anthropic nerds! Do not be ashamed of the soft and slippery.
4. I am now reminded that I knew they were trying dreaming at scale, as I'm actually on the waitlist for it! And that backs up my overall takeway, actually: I can't help but feel like they're either A) vastly underestimating the amount of CogSci literature that could help them go beyond the "dreaming is when you think in your offtime" paradigm, or B) not sharing their real learnings.
Today's RSI announcement and the final sentence of this seminal plog post being a pitch for enterprise customers supports the latter, I think. That's ostensibly a good thing from a societal stability perspective, but I can't help but feel left out -- not to mention paralyzed by fear of the known unknown...
What was today's RSI announcement?
I'm still reading it, but to your first part:
That "I never got to finish" feeling is the absolute worst. I've been struggling with it for years, and I feel like understand ya here.
It absolutely sucks you feel that, and I hope you find some comfort soon, however it may come.
If you're looking for a "so what now?" Moment, there's only one thing I can say that I've been proselytizing a bit: share everything. All the time. And get people to look at it and be your hype person; and if you're not getting that in your friend ground or workplace or community, find a new one to add to.
The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
You've done nothing wrong. You're just with some other folks like us that don't have the same die rolling power.
Don't give up on your ideas. Don't stop experimenting. Make your own tools because it's for you, and maybe your dice will come up that you get the other person in the world that sees it and goes "yes!" And you get all the fancy posts and stars and attention and such. Because that feeling of validation - not just popularity, but acceptance and being seen and heard for one's craft - is one everyone seeks and needs in life. It's not a weakness. It's being a human.
Thank you for sharing your experience with internet strangers.
> The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
Many of us have ideas, ideas are cheap. Executing a complex idea well from thought to completion is much more rare.
That's kinda the point, right? Ideas are cheap, so companies can afford to buy 1000 humans worth of ideas to try and particle collider them together. Execution is rarely one person sitting in a room and pressing buttons and things change.
So my thought about sharing and not thinking about "my secret sauce" anymore is just necessary. Share what you think your cool flavor of an idea is, someone else can groove on it, and maybe you and them will grow it into something more.
A major problem as I see it is kinda geek-class-warfare coming to a head. So much of my personal and anecdotally collected experience from others is essentially being locked out of knowledge and ideation because a "upper geek class" decided that they were not worthy of having their idea shared, specifically because that class thought they could make money from it, or because they were insular for some other in group reason. That meant good ideas that just needed a single word or connecting bridge from one topic to another ended up withering, and mediocre ideas ended up being accelerated because of just sheer populace force.
And that just makes people feel bad. Someone working for 2 1/2 years on an idea that just happens to come out on the Internet is not going to feel good. It's going to make them feel invalidated, it's going to make them feel exhausted, it's going to make them feel like they didn't do enough. When it's just not the case.
Anyway. I just wanted to say something to this as well, because it's sort of just dismisses a person's ideas. I don't think you're intentionally doing that, but even repeating the phrase, "ideas are cheap" cheapens what it actually takes to come up with an idea. And now in 2026, when literally any idea can become something real, I really don't think ideas being cheap means ideas aren't valuable.
I may have been too loose with my wording. Lots of people can come up with concepts and ideas. Everyone used to have an idea for an app back when it was cool, I thought about location based dating apps maybe 5-10 years before they became a thing. I'm certain there were at least a few hundred thousand people if not more who had a similar idea - that's what I meant, that's the cheap part. Actually working late nights or even quitting your job to implement the idea, or having the right network and social skills to make it happen - that part is rare. Even today with agents it's still hard and rare to create a profitable business. So we weren't talking about the same thing.
> And that just makes people feel bad. Someone working for 2 1/2 years on an idea that just happens to come out on the Internet is not going to feel good
This was more than an idea for you and more than a hobbey at least according to my definitions of those terms. I'd call it a passion research / early stage business venture depending on how much effort you put into it and what your intentions for it were.
I struggle to see anything "seminal" in the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50402734
So after reading the article, I asked a Claude Code session I'm working in at the moment about its memory and whether it needs to "dream" to reorganize itself because I honestly wasn't sure what it was doing about it.
It explained that unlike Chat, each project in Claude Code creates memory files in ~/.claude/projects/[project path]/memory/ with notes about both the project and my impromptu directives or instructions, and a MEMORY.md index file that's loaded for every new session. It told me that my current project - which has been going on for a while - has 61 files in its memory, so it suggested that now in fact would be a good time to clean them up. Perfect.
It gave some examples of things things it has memorized: Apparently I once told it to always capitalize the first letter after a colon. I don't remember doing that, but hey, that's basic English grammar, dammit, so I can see myself getting pissy about it. It had saved that bit of petulance on my part in the memory.
That's great, but it was saved only in the memory folder of that project. This is good to know! I hadn't realized that stuff wasn't saved globally. Or rather, I vaguely remember turning that option off at some point and now I'm realizing that means I need to do some maintenance manually if I don't want to have to constantly remind Claude to capitalize properly, (and to always refer to me as Mr. Big.)
Definitely a good article for me to read right now.
Looks like a promising way to bind customers.
Another day, another Anthropic marketing article trying to deceive people into believing Claude is conscious. Absolutely insane anybody takes this company seriously when they describe "writing notes into an .md file to be re-injected into context later" as ""dreaming"".
Dreaming is being used here as an analogy for a post-hoc conflict resolution process for memory (which is part of the theorized purpose of dreaming in the human brain), rather than used literally. I think it's the best word to describe what it does and it is very important to a good memory system, as memory conflicts are one of the most likely things pulling down their performance in the long run. Not really a misnomer, imo, and i don't think they are trying to use the word to suggest that Claude is conscious.
> post-hoc conflict resolution process for memory (which is part of the theorized purpose of dreaming in the human brain)
That’s not accurate. One leading hypothesis is that the experience of dreaming is a side effect of memory processing and consolidation[1]. Using the name of a side effect to describe the process that produces it is misleading, and at best it goes well beyond what’s actually known.
[1] “The process of memory reactivation and consolidation in the sleeping brain appears to influence conscious experience during sleep, contributing to dream content recalled on awakening.” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4704085/
It is incredibly unscientific. Superstitious, in fact.
I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if Anthropic were to reconstitute itself as a religion.
Such a bullshit article, as much of Anthropic "research" is these days.
> By “agent memory,” we mean knowledge that Claude gains from experience—including interactions with users and tasks it’s been assigned—and that it retains between sessions, saved as context it can read later.
That Claude rarely, if ever, actually "remembers". Since these are just random markdown files randomly injected into the tiny context.
"I'm sorry, I'll make a note of it" and will proceed to write a 15000th note with the same content it's already written dozens of times before
> We compared the memory folders from one run each of Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Fable 5, when each was about 10,000 steps into the game.
What a useless experiment
> That general guidance was enough for Opus 4.7 and Opus 5 to use memory effectively
Define "effectively"
> In this case, prompting Claude to read its memory files before answering—and then to explicitly test its theories—nearly doubled its benchmark score
Then it's not "memory". It's just telling the model to read a text/spec file before implementing something
> Claude doesn’t load all of its auto memory into every session’s context window. It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
So, random injection of random things into context that depend on whether the short ToC entries have any relevance on what Claude is doing, and which will be ignored.
And you have to explicitly tell the agent to read specific files otherwise it will ignore them.
What is this bloated article about?
Exactly my experience with claude-code. It keeps apologising for not using the memory and keep storing the same memory again and again.