agent-memory-patterns

agent-memory-patterns is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills. It costs 76 tokens per session (3,887 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing memory for AI agents, including temporary context, task notes, and long-term records of past events or knowledge.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design or review how an agent remembers information across messages, tasks, sessions, or multiple agents.
Why use it?
It helps prevent agents from losing context, repeating mistakes, or storing and retrieving information in unsuitable ways.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

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/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/agent-memory-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills --skill agent-memory-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for agent-memory-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/agent-memory-patterns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/agent-memory-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/agent-memory-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/agent-memory-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,887 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 5.1 $0.00076 $0.03887
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01944
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00777
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00389

Measured 6d ago against content hash 6d244952b783, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-memory-patterns 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 6d ago.

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.

skills/agent-memory-patterns/SKILL.md · 369 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 369 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Memory Patterns

Overview

Memory is the foundation of agent intelligence. Without structured memory, agents repeat mistakes, lose context across sessions, and cannot build compound knowledge over time. A well-designed memory system determines what the agent remembers, how it retrieves relevant context, and when it safely forgets.

When to use: Designing a stateful AI agent or autonomous workflow; reviewing agent code for context management; evaluating retrieval latency or cost; any system where an agent must persist knowledge across conversation turns, sessions, or agent boundaries.

Quick Reference

Memory Type Storage Retrieval Strategy Lifetime Use Case
Short-term Context window (in-memory) Direct inclusion — no retrieval needed Single session Active conversation, current task state
Working Scratchpad / todo file Sequential read — agent writes and reads directly Task duration Reasoning steps, partial results, sub-goals
Long-term episodic Vector DB with timestamps Embedding similarity + recency weighting Months to permanent Past interactions, specific sessions, event log
Long-term semantic Structured store / knowledge graph Keyword or concept-graph traversal Permanent until invalidated Facts, entities, domain knowledge
Procedural File store / instinct YAML Template match on task type Permanent Reusable patterns, learned workflows, instincts

Memory Type Taxonomy

Short-term Memory (Context Window)

Short-term memory is the active context window — everything currently visible to the model. It is the fastest and most reliable form of retrieval because no lookup is required.

Capacity constraint: Modern models support 8K–200K tokens, but the effective working range for coherent reasoning is typically 20–50K tokens. Beyond that, attention degrades on early content ("lost in the middle" problem).

Management strategy: Use a token budget allocator that reserves slots for system prompt, tool definitions, recent history, and retrieved context. Drop oldest turns first when the budget is exceeded.

Read the full file on GitHub · 369 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 369 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 6d244952b783

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-memory-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,887 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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