What If Forgetting Is the Intelligence?

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:00:00 -0400

If you use AI agents seriously, you’ve probably noticed something without giving it a name. Fresh chats start from zero. Switching from Claude to Cursor loses your context. You explain your project for the third time this week and shrug it off as the price of doing business. Researchers call this the memory problem, and the field is in the middle of an argument about how to fix it.

I’ve spent the past year, sometimes more, building memory systems for AI agents in the background of my day job. Tri-modal architectures running across three databases at once, taxonomies of specialized worker agents I called cognitive minions, decay algorithms for letting old beliefs fade, session-memory graphs that kept track of what we were doing across days. Most of that work never left my own laptop. Then a few weeks ago I came across a small open-source project with eight stars on GitHub and a sharper philosophy than most well-funded products in the space. I wrote an integration layer for it. The result is called hermes-cashew, and it helped me to appreciate something about agent memory that validated what I was seeing inside of my own bespoke prototypes.

Cashew on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

What If Forgetting Is the Intelligence?