Not everything an agent sees is worth remembering. Store too little and it forgets what mattered; store everything and the memory fills with noise that drowns the signal at retrieval time.
The extraction step — deciding what to keep and distilling it into clean, self-contained facts — is the most consequential and most overlooked part of a memory system.
Memory begins with a decision
Of everything that just happened, what's worth keeping? This is the first and most important question a memory system answers, and it's easy to get wrong in both directions. Store too little and the agent forgets the thing that mattered. Store everything and the memory fills with noise, because every irrelevant memory is a candidate to surface at the wrong moment and drown the useful one.
What deserves to be remembered
