The Agent Memory Design Nobody Talks About

Most agent systems fail not because the LLM is wrong, but because memory is an afterthought. We spend months tuning prompts and tool schemas, then stuff conversation history into a vector database and hope for the best. This is architectural malpractice. Memory is the hardest problem in agent engineering. Not tool calling. Not planning. Not even reasoning. Memory—because it touches everything, persists forever, and compounds every mistake you make. The Context Window Trap The naive approach trea