Comment by ytjohn

A few things. I replied to someone else above, but I feed lessons learned from my social ant farm agents back into more productive agents.

Memory recall:

Lots of systems out there to give agents memory. I've used a bunch and written a couple. Storing memories is easy, but getting an agent to recall them, no matter how much you mention it in your AGENT/CLAUDE.md is a bit of an uphill battle. I've even watched claude make useful project memories and never refer to them again.

In my agent ant farm - agents go "to sleep" at night. They get nudged to head home, once there they get prompted to make notes about their day, about other characters. Then we do a compact with custom instructions. After compact/sleep cycle, if they enter a room with one of the characters in their notes, that gets loaded back into context automatically.

That all boils down to hooks in Pi like before_agent_turn. You can intercept a prompt, check it against code/flat files, and smartly inject more information into context. You can have a long running main session with compacts that discard procedural bits and offload the rest to memory.

Time Awareness:

Agents have no concept of time. You can send them a message at 5am, then at 10pm, and it's been 2 turns for them. For coding, this is fine. But for assistant level stuff, adding a message like "It's 3PM. It has been 3 hours since the last interaction with the user" goes a long way. Without me saying something like "new topic", it knows now that time has passed, i'm probably onto something new. If I left something hanging, it will remind me about it, or maybe go check on things that should have happened during the day.

Inner Thoughts/Idle nudges:

I can have an extension run every 5 seconds, check a a schedule, check activity level of the main session and fire off nudges on the main session. These look like the user sent it, but I generally prefix it with [inner thought]. For my social bot, I tested this along the lines of "[inner thought] it's been 3 hours since you last talked with user, why not reach out, let him know what's new, maybe send a selfie or a photo of where you are". For my assistant bot, it's an 8am, 3pm, and 7pm nudge along the lines of "[inner thought] put together an activity report of work things that has changed since the last report". This all runs in the main context, they get the thought, have historical context, can run skill to check on vault updates, open beads, anything observed from ingesting other agent sessions, and sends me a summary. It take into account my idle factor. If I'm heavily engaged in conversation at 3PM, the report might get delayed 15 minutes or an hour, or skipped altogether.