Comment by threecheese
2 days ago
They are imo over-relying on Claude automemory here, which is terrible at contextualizing memory access and makes huge leaps that don’t make sense - except when it’s actually useful, which makes the problem even worse for an operator who can’t see the thinking process anymore.
Yes, I worked on a related project, no I don’t want you to use those memories to make assumptions which emerge as decisions that I didn’t want. With reasoning traces hidden, I am sometimes not even sure if it used those memories or just independently decided that PCI-DSS subsection-whatever is somehow relevant to this PR that has the word “credit”.
There is no way for me to fully configure memory preferences at a granularity which would be useful, and so I continue to use context files (and other tools, sometimes) to ensure the right memories are stored and surfaced at the right times.
There’s a lot of room for agent memory improvement across the ecosystem, and I don’t think the LLM providers should try to own this vertical slice. This will never happen though, because it makes us “sticky”.
Or maybe I’m holding it wrong.
A CLAUDE.md file has no moat, it can be read by other agents.
Automemory can be weaved into the product in ways that make it harder to switch.
This is a company that's looking to IPO soon at a trillion+ dollar valuation, and they need to pull every lever to keep the users they got during the past year's boom.
Those auto memories are also annoying because by default they are not version controlled and land in a secret location. I much prefer storing stuff in a version controlled `CLAUDE.md` file.
Or shared across colleagues.
It's an insane way of managing what is essentially configuration in this day and age, literally throwing away all our hard-earned lessons of the last 3 decades.
Worse still, it'll just use it randomly, and you have to notice it's done it.
"The user never wants to use ORDER BY Timestamp, I'll add this as a memory"
"For this object, JUST FOR THIS OBJECT! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"
I don't like the memories, but I value them. I do a regular sweep of the memories, extract to harness or docs, then delete them.
I’ve rolled a small program to enforce consistency, lint rules, and human-authored files for Claude Memory.
It’s insanely powerful when doing by a human 100%. It’s conversely harmful when an agent manages it. There’s several papers about how LLM-managed memory is unequivocally terrible.
Indeed. I find it quite bizarre that just about the only thing the LLM appears incapable of doing is writing appropriate instructions for an LLM - whether it be memories, sub agent prompts, planning documents.
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I believe this is a move to make user spent even much more tokens