Agent Memory: What Happens When It's Wrong? (Ep 5)

​Maintenance is the layer that decides whether your agent returns a fact that stopped being true six sessions ago, and every intervention the researchers tested that tried to do more of it did worse — stricter merging helped, delaying flushes to batch writes hurt, and forcing coarser summaries hurt more. Plain long context still beat every maintained system on exact recall.

​We close the series on the uncomfortable number underneath all of it: keeping memory tidy, not storing it, is what actually costs you.