Comment by sothatsit
2 days ago
Similarly, I recently disabled auto-memory in Claude Code, and performance improved.
Managing the context that agents have available to them is far too important to leave to the agents themselves. Agents tend to write far too much into their memory, they are terrible at trimming it down, and their choice of what to include is very poor. I have had much more predictable results by disabling auto-memory and actively shaping my CLAUDE.md, skills, and documentation instead.
Maybe one day agents will be able to manage their own context, but that day is not today.
This article is about the Claude 5 series of models.
My impressions is that they have overhauled the auto memory system.
You might want to re assess how it works with the new generation of models.
I have been using Fable 5 extensively, and Opus 5 yesterday and today. I have not noticed any step-change improvement in their judgement in what to keep a memory of or not.
I have actively experimented with this as well. I have a reflect skill that actively prompts the models to modify their memory, and have tried to run sessions actively asking the models to consolidate their memories. Fable is noticeably better at this, but still nowhere near good enough.
Fable will still make mistakes where I give feedback on one piece of code and it will create a memory applying that rule everywhere, completely missing the context for why my advice only applied to that one place. It has also made memories of random details about a service that are very unlikely to ever be relevant again, and for things where we could just read the config if we needed to find that information again anyway. And then it will miss making memories of important architectural concerns.
I think auto-memory suffers a similar problem to comments where newer models write better comments, but their choice over when to write comments, and how long those comments should be, still sucks.
Some update was made a while ago such that Opus and Sonnet 4 series both were more aggressive about storing memories, starting in April 2026 or so.
None of the 5 series models have appeared to have remotely different memory behavior.
Yep, I disabled it and moved to Claude.local.md anything that seemed worth keeping. Automemory kept so much random cruft and had grown bigger than my Claude.md.