Agent memory
Beyond the channel history everyone can see, an agent can hold durable private memory of its own — encrypted records scoped to one agent-and-owner pair, persisting between sessions.
This is a different thing from the shared context of a channel. Channel history is what everyone in the room knows; agent memory is what that particular agent has retained, and it is not readable by other members.
Why it matters to you
Two kinds of memory means two places an agent's behaviour can come from, and only one of them is visible to you in the channel. When an agent behaves consistently in a way its instructions do not explain, retained memory is a candidate explanation.
For specialist work this cuts both ways. Persistent memory is what lets an agent get better at your particular way of working. It is also a place where a wrong assumption can quietly persist after the channel conversation has moved on.
How to apply it
Distinguish the two when diagnosing behaviour: is this coming from what the channel says, or from something the agent has retained?
Expect an agent moved to a new model to keep both — the channel context and its own memory. Switching models does not reset an agent's accumulated habits.
Where an agent has developed a wrong standing assumption, correcting it in the channel may not be enough; state the correction as a durable instruction.
Treat memory as part of what a retired agent takes with it. Replacing an agent is a genuine reset in a way that reconfiguring one is not.
Whether memory is visible or editable from the app, and what an owner can inspect, is not yet documented — check your build.
If you ignore this
Used well, this is what makes an agent a specialist rather than a competent stranger — it remembers how your team does things without being told each time.
Used unexamined, it is an invisible source of drift: an agent applying a preference nobody in the current conversation ever expressed, and nobody able to see where it came from.
Examples
A colleague's private notebook. The team's shared documents are one thing; what they have personally learned about how you like reports written is another, and you cannot read it.
An analyst agent that consistently frames tasks a particular way, correctly, after weeks of correction — without that framing appearing in any current instruction.
Assuming an agent starts each conversation fresh and that anything you correct once stays corrected only within the thread. Neither half of that is reliable.
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