I feel like so many of these memory solutions are incredibly over-engineered too.

You can work around a lot of the memory issues for large and complex tasks just by making the agent keep work logs. Critical context to keep throughout large pieces of work include decisions, conversations, investigations, plans and implementations - a normal developer should be tracking these and it's sensible to have the agent track them too in a way that survives compaction.

Yep. I just have my agents write out key details to a markdown file. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Just enough to reorient itself to a problem.

Great advise. For large plans I tell the agent to write to an “implementation_log.md” and make note of it during compaction. Additionally the agent can also just reference the original session logs.