One project, three tasks. What should the agent remember?

Discussions
1

I want an agent’s context to follow the task, not a fixed checklist of what to remember.

Here’s a made-up example. A team added a response cache, found that it served stale data, then disabled it while they investigated. The project memory still holds the service overview, the original decision, the incident and the decision to turn caching off.

Now give the agent three jobs:

  • Fix the cache bug. I want it to see the failing case and know that caching is currently off. The original design may help, but it isn’t permission to turn the cache back on.
  • Explain the service to a new teammate. I want the service overview and the current limitation. I don’t need the whole incident history in that explanation.
  • Explain why we turned caching off. Here I do want the history, including the old decision and the one that replaced it.

Nothing in the stored memory changed between those requests. What I need from it changed. Some context can stay the same, but the old decision should be available when I ask about the past without showing up as current advice.

In your Cursor setup, what decides which of those notes the agent sees when you switch tasks?

Disclosure: I co-founded Mnemoverse. I’m describing how I want this to work, not claiming a shipped feature.

5

I think this gets even more important once agents can take actions instead of just answering questions. Using outdated context to explain something is annoying. Using outdated context to deploy code or re-enable a feature could be a production incident. It feels like agents need a way to distinguish historical context from currently authorized state.