Strongly agree here. claude-code’s memory system is occasionally useful but much more often harmful, pulling in obsolete info that muddies the waters about current tasks. I’ve frequently seen Claude’s own memories severely mislead it.

My guess is that has something to do with the training process leaving models unable to differentiate between “what’s happening now” and “what happened before”. Perhaps if making inferences from memories was actually part of the training process things would be different but my sense is that as an inference-time-only feature this just gets the models confused.

Humans make memories constantly, but they also forget things that are no longer relevant. Until Claude can do that, it means the LLM will have an ever-increasing, ever more fragmented context.

And LLMs are NOT intelligent enough to survive even mild context poisoning.

When claude goes down a wrong path, I tend to clear context and write a new prompt that helps guide it down the correct path. Whatever thinking or context that led it there has inertia and tends to be sticky, otherwise.

Pretty annoying when it brings those up again later from memory...

I'd add on that the models have a very poor sense of time and the complex changes in world state that occur as time passes.

Training with memory is an interesting idea...