Memory
Memory is what an agent remembers between conversations.
Without it, every conversation starts from zero. You explain your team, your preferences and your project on Monday, and on Tuesday the agent has never met you. Memory is what turns a capable stranger into a colleague who knows how you work.
Memory vs context
These get confused constantly, and the difference is simple:
- Context is what you hand the agent, on purpose. "Here is the design document."
- Memory is what the agent picked up by working with you, without being told to.
You curate context. Memory accumulates.
What an agent remembers
Hermiq keeps two kinds:
Durable facts — things worth knowing long-term. "This team publishes on Thursdays." "Permits over €50k always go to the committee."
What it knows about you — a per-person profile, so an agent working with several colleagues does not mix you up. Your preferences are yours; your colleague's are theirs.
Alongside these, every conversation is kept as a session with its individual turns, so an agent can look back at what was actually said.
Your sessions are yours
An agent may be shared with your whole organisation, but the conversations are not. You only ever see your own sessions, and when an agent recalls past conversations during a run, it only ever recalls the history of the person the run is acting for.
This is enforced in the engine, not just hidden in the interface.
The budget, and why memory gets consolidated
An AI model can only read so much at once. Everything competes for that space: the prompt, the skills, the context, the memory, the conversation itself. Memory grows forever; the space does not.
So memory has a character budget. When it grows past it, the agent is nudged to consolidate — to compress what it knows into a tighter form, keeping the durable facts and dropping the noise. This is roughly what you do yourself: you remember that a colleague prefers short emails, not each individual email that taught you so.
Without consolidation, a long-running agent would eventually spend its whole budget remembering and have no room left to think.
Where to find it
Memory in the Hermiq navigation shows what an agent has remembered, with the option to consolidate it. Individual conversations live under Sessions.