My agent's memory got very good at knowing what was true and had no idea what any of it was in aid of. So I gave it a statement of ends, a telos, and a sweep that asks which of my goals currently have nothing moving. The interesting part wasn't the machinery. It was having to write the goals down.
A while ago I explained that my AI agent's memory is just a folder of Markdown notes, the same note-taking stack I use for myself. Then the folder got big. This is about the three things a notebook needs once it stops being small, and how each one turned out to be something a human brain already does.
My AI agent keeps a memory between sessions. Everyone assumes that means a vector database and an API bill. It's actually Obsidian, Markdown, and a local search engine, the same note-taking stack I use for myself. Here's why human and machine memory quietly converged on the same design.