You told your agent to remember something, and a week later, not a word about it. On 27 October, at AI Tuesday in Pattaya, I spent an hour on why this happens and what to do about it. The whole talk was recorded, and you can watch it right here (it’s in Russian).
None of it came from a textbook. I’ve been living with my own agent built on Hermes for six months, and since October I’ve been maintaining the holographic memory plugin in the official Hermes catalogue. Almost everything in the talk I first broke on my own setup and then fixed.
What the talk covers
It opens with the main frustration: four reasons an agent forgets, and what to do about each. Right after that comes a distinction many people miss: context is the desk, memory is the filing cabinet. A long conversation does not give an agent a good memory, and sometimes it only gets in the way.
Then I open up holographic. Where the plugin gets its “holographic” name (expect Gabor and HRR), how it stores facts and how it picks the right ones at the moment you ask, the lifecycle of a fact and what happens when you say “forget it”. There’s also a separate part on per-chat memory, what it costs in tokens, and how local holographic differs from cloud providers.
The second half is about keeping things in order. Dreaming works at night, picking what matters for permanent memory and reviewing what has gone stale. Then come five rules for what goes where: what to keep in permanent memory and what to move to external memory. After that, what we added to holographic from version 0.14 to 0.19.2, and the cloud judge for dreaming, with real numbers.
At the end: three ideas worth taking home, installing both plugins in five minutes, and questions from the audience.
What to read next
If the talk makes you want to dig deeper, the blog has several pieces on the same subject. How the five layers of Hermes memory work and how the providers differ is covered in the piece on Hermes Agent memory. How holographic works and how to upgrade without losing facts is in the article on the holographic plugin. How the plugin has changed from version to version is in the round-up of updates up to 0.23, and the latest version is always listed in the plugin repository. For the nightly memory clean-up, see how dreaming works and what its cloud judge can do.
Bring questions about the talk and about your own agents to the IT Party chat (in Russian): we’ll work through them on a real example.
