Although I agree that current memory implementations don't help at all, I don't agree with this analogy:

> No one rewatches a team meeting from 3 years ago to remember constraints around a feature. People write things down and use those records instead.

Memory plugins don't re-read old transcripts. Memory snippets are basically the notes that people write down after the meeting.

The problem, however, is different. The problem with memory plugins is that your agent basically writes a note every time someone says a sentence, and then tries to work with those 5000 notes.

Instead, the agent should recognize what's important and write only that. And that is, of course, a documentation. (And ADRs, if you want not only a description of the final state, but also the trajectory of how the agent arrived to it. Which, arguably, contains more information than the docs themsleves.)

Another difference is that memory snippets are immutable, append-only and don't have a lot of structure. Of course, this is done to be able to store lots and lots of notes: they should be independent. The main problem is that increasing the number of notes adds not enough benefits to compensate for downsides of this structure-less immutable format.

I don't trust agents writing specs without human approval.

I've been bitten by agent-written ADRs. Agents carelessly add extrapolated details and speculated nice-to-haves that I never asked for, and this becomes a source of bloat that keeps coming back like a boomerang.

There is a hierarchical distillation of understanding in human processes that agentic processes do not yet execute.