My Local AI Assistant Got Worse When I Remembered Too Much
I moved a personal AI assistant onto a small local model last week and immediately hit a boring problem: the model was fine, but my memory layer was not.
The old version persisted raw conversation history and replayed it back into the prompt. That worked well enough with hosted models. Then I pointed the same app at a local OpenAI-compatible server running Qwen3-4B-4bit through Swama on the Mac mini.
After 196 accumulated messages, the assistant started doing the classic small-model failure mode: parroting its own previous replies, over-weighting stale context, and sounding less useful the more “memory” I gave it.
The fix was not a vector database. It was deleting most of the memory.
