memory-systems

A guide to designing memory for software agents so they can retain knowledge between sessions, track entities and time, and retrieve related information. It covers approaches such as databases, graphs, and vector search.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building persistent agent memory, comparing memory frameworks, tracking changing entities, or selecting tests for memory quality.
Why use it?
It helps choose a memory design that keeps information consistent and useful as an agent and its history grow.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/docxology/template/memory-systems
Any agent
npx skills add docxology/template --skill memory-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/docxology/template

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,294 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00068 $0.03294
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01647
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00659
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00329

Measured yesterday against content hash 9e2b38ffe947, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

memory-systems scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/memory_store.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to memory-systems — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/memory-systems/SKILL.md · 230 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 230 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Memory System Design

Memory provides the persistence layer that allows agents to maintain continuity across sessions and reason over accumulated knowledge. Simple agents rely entirely on context for memory, losing all state when sessions end. Sophisticated agents implement layered memory architectures that balance immediate context needs with long-term knowledge retention. The evolution from vector stores to knowledge graphs to temporal knowledge graphs represents increasing investment in structured memory for improved retrieval and reasoning.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

  • Building agents that must persist knowledge across sessions
  • Choosing between memory frameworks (Mem0, Zep/Graphiti, Letta, LangMem, Cognee)
  • Needing to maintain entity consistency across conversations
  • Implementing reasoning over accumulated knowledge
  • Designing memory architectures that scale in production
  • Evaluating memory systems against benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, DMR)
  • Building dynamic memory with automatic entity/relationship extraction and self-improving memory (Cognee)

Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills:

  • File-backed scratchpads, run logs, and tool-output offloading: filesystem-context.
  • Conversation compaction or human-readable handoff summaries: context-compression.
  • Masking, prefix caching, token budgets, or retrieval scoping inside one trajectory: context-optimization.
  • Formal belief/desire/intention models over RDF state: bdi-mental-states.

Core Concepts

Think of memory as a spectrum from volatile context window to persistent storage. Default to the simplest layer that meets retrieval needs, because benchmark evidence suggests tool complexity matters less than reliable retrieval for some memory workloads (claim-memory-locomo-filesystem-baseline). Add structure (graphs, temporal validity) only when retrieval quality degrades or the agent needs multi-hop reasoning, relationship traversal, or time-travel queries.

Read the full file on GitHub · 230 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 230 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 9e2b38ffe947

Subscribe to this mod's changes

memory-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository docxology/template (19 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 3,294 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to memory-systems, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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