Your agent's failures are its most valuable memory, and almost nobody stores them
· 7 min read
Everyone building agent memory is building the same thing: remember what worked, remember what was decided, remember who prefers tabs. Useful. But the expensive amnesia is not forgetting successes. It is forgetting failures.
An agent that forgets a success re-derives it in a few hundred tokens. An agent that forgets a failure re-attempts it: the refactor that broke prod, the "obvious cleanup" that was load-bearing, the dependency upgrade that was abandoned twice for the same reason. You pay for the same dead end every time a fresh session walks into it confidently.