AI Systems Atlas

X-08The Four Memories

/context/memory-types

Working, episodic, semantic, procedural — four stores with different lifetimes, indexes, and write rules.

Key insight

Each type earns its own machinery: working memory lives in the window; the rest live outside it and come back through retrieval, each indexed differently.

Failure mode

One undifferentiated “memory” blob: episodes stored as facts, preferences stored as events, and retrieval that can’t tell them apart.

Further reading
RelatedWrite policies & decayRetrieval

Elsewhere in the atlas

Harnesses →Security →Evals →Coding Agents →