If you’ve spent time working with AI coding tools, you’ve probably hit the compaction wall. Suddenly, your agent knows what it’s currently working on but has completely forgotten the five other things connected to it.

This is the memory problem, and it’s a big one.

The Context Window Isn’t Enough

Your AI agent needs some sort of memory system that lives outside the context window. When you’re working on simple, one-off tasks, the chat-as-workspace approach works fine. You ask a question, you get an answer, you move on. But the moment you’re tackling a complex set of related tasks? It breaks down fast.

I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of a framework I’m calling the Agentic Maturity Model. The short version is that there are distinct levels to how teams and developers use AI agents, and moving between levels isn’t about using “better” tools, but rather it’s a shift in how you approach the work.

Four months ago, there were no real options. The good news? It seems like all the model providers recognize this is the next frontier. Memory and persistence are where I’m looking for the actual progress to happen next.

Claude Code has certainly gotten better in these areas over the last couple of months. They’ve added an auto memory feature in beta. They added a lightweight Tasks system based on a Todo system called Beads built by Steve Yegge. His key idea was that the task state should live outside the context window.

These are meaningful building blocks towards an actual working memory system that persists across sessions and survives compaction.

We’re Almost There

The tooling and harneses we built on top of the LLMs are already changing how software gets built, but where we are headed? Here is what I think:

• auto-improving memory: where the agent learns your patterns, your codebase, your preferences
• persistent task tracking that survives compaction: Tasks, todos, issues, whatever you want to call them. The point is they exist outside the conversation.

When those two pieces come together properly, the workflow for everyone will change again.

Your agent doesn’t just respond to the current prompt. It knows where it is in a larger plan, what’s been done, what’s blocked, and what’s next. That’s the difference between a helpful chatbot and an actual collaborator.

We are so close I can taste the blood in the water, oh wait, that’s mine. ☠️