Working state
Current goal, evidence, unresolved questions, loop counter, approvals, and pending actions.
LESSON 06 · PERSISTENCE
State and Memory
Agents need continuity, but persistence creates correctness, privacy, and staleness risks. Decide what should survive each step, run, case, and session.
Memory is a data architecture decision.
Do not let “memory” collapse working state, past experiences, durable knowledge, and authoritative business records into one vector store. Each category has different ownership, freshness, retention, and correctness requirements.
D→V RULE
The system of record should remain outside the model's memory. Memory may help retrieve or summarize business state, but authoritative facts should be re-read from authoritative sources.
Episodic memory
Past cases that may help future reasoning, subject to retention and relevance rules.
Semantic memory
Durable approved procedures, taxonomies, product definitions, and operating guidance.
External record
Authoritative shipment, approval, transaction, and audit state read from source systems.
| Information | Storage class | Retention / freshness |
|---|---|---|
| Current task state | ||
| Prior resolved case | ||
| Company policy | ||
| Approval record | ||
| Sensitive transient prompt data |
INTERACTIVE LAB · MEMORY ROUTING
Where should this information live?
Choose persistence based on operational purpose, authority, sensitivity, and staleness risk.
LESSON ARTIFACT
Write the State & Memory Plan.
Make persistence explicit enough that engineers can implement retention, refresh, deletion, and authoritative-source rules.