Remembers Everything, Learns Nothing
The agent broke a rule it had written down
The agent had the rule. You can find it in its memory file, line 1,140 of about 1,800: do not reformat the config, the deploy is strict about its indentation. You wrote it there three weeks ago, the last time it broke the deploy. This morning the agent reformatted the config. The deploy broke. It remembered the rule and broke it anyway.
Anyone who has run an agent for more than a week has met some version of this. You added memory. You did the responsible thing, gave the agent a place to keep what it learned, and then watched it keep the wrong things, or keep the right things somewhere it never looks. Run 100 came out no sharper than run 1. The store filled up and the behaviour stayed exactly where it was.
It remembered too much, and it kept all of it in one pile, where 1,800 lines bury every instruction equally. The rule loaded. It just loaded as one line among the hundreds it had needed once and never again.
