Short Term Memory

Context Window Management: Engineering Agent Short-Term Memory

As agents execute long tasks, their context windows fill with tool results, reasoning traces, and intermediate outputs. Managing this finite resource — deciding what to keep, summarize, compress, or offload — is a core engineering challenge that directly determines how far an agent can run before degrading or failing.

What is Short-Term Memory in AI Agents?

Short-term memory in AI agents is the working information available during a single task — the conversation history, tool results, and intermediate reasoning steps held in the model's context window. Like human working memory, it's fast and immediately accessible, but strictly limited in capacity.