Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A written trace, kept outside the assistant over the course of working exchanges, of what was done, decided, encountered and left pending — meant to be reloaded at the start of a later session.
Full definition
The word "memory" ordinarily designates what a tool retains of its own accord: the model keeps certain elements it judges useful, with no guarantee about what it will give back. Used that way, it describes a property of the tool.
In the articles on this blog, session memory is the opposite: an artifact external to the assistant, held in Markdown files placed in the project's repository. It is not what the assistant remembers, it is what will be given back to it.
Three traits delimit it. It is daily in its lower form — one file per day, in fixed sections — and condensed in its upper form, a long_memory.md maintained under a ceiling. It is written automatically, at the end of each conversational turn, with no gesture of designation. And it is reloaded on request: capture is continuous, restitution is an act.
Usage in the field
Used to designate what makes it possible to pick up interrupted work, and to distinguish what you hold yourself from what an assistant retains on its side.
Synonyms and variants
"agent memory" when the emphasis falls on the recipient rather than the moment of production; "session log" when speaking only of the daily floor.
Not to be confused with
- an assistant's native memory — what a tool retains of its own accord, filed in its installation and tied to the machine. It isn't versioned, isn't reread in an editor, doesn't travel with the project.
- a project's rules file — a statement of the conventions and prohibitions that must always hold. It is written in the cold and dates nothing; session memory dates everything and prescribes nothing.
- Context — a durable workspace gathering sources, notes, decisions and drafts around a goal. Session memory is one of its contents, the one that records the unfolding rather than the material.
- Active memory — organizational memory that keeps, alongside the facts, what they taught, in a portable and governed form. Session memory records an unfolding; active memory keeps what is retained from it.
- Persistence — the gesture by which a human designates a fragment that must survive the exchange. Session memory obtains a neighbouring result without that gesture: the selection is made there by a model according to a criterion written in advance.
Examples
Picking up on Monday morning a bug left pending on Friday: session memory gives the state of the problem, what was tried, what was decided and what remained to do, without your having to explain it again.
Ambiguities / debates
The word circulates in three senses that nothing distinguishes in speech — what the model retains, what the tool stores on the machine, what the project records in its repository. That is the reason this entry exists.