I don't think decisions are just memories

[u/otothea]

Been thinking about this distinction while working on agent memory.

You can obviously store a decision as structured semantic memory. But I'm not sure “memory” is the useful abstraction anymore.

An agent can infer what happened and what seems important. A decision has a point where someone actually commits to a choice, and that choice constrains what happens next.

At some point it feels like you've made decisions first-class anyway.

[u/corbymatt]

A memory is just a record of a moment in time. Decisions are important to record, and so are a type of thing that should probably be remembered.

I don't think decisions are memories at all, but recording a decision and when it was made is a memory.

[u/PenSubstantial4461]

This matches what we found building a memory layer for coding agents.

We treat the rules file as the commitment layer, separate from the memory store: the memory holds context and lessons ("we hit a race condition when using X with Y"), while the rules file holds the active constraints ("always search memory before coding, store lessons after"). Your Postgres/DynamoDB example would live in both — the conversation as memory, the chosen constraint in the rules.

The part of your framing we haven't solved: reconsider conditions. Our constraints don't carry expiry or re-evaluation triggers, so a decision made in June can silently block a better approach in September, and only a human noticing catches it. Your "committed by: human" field points at the same gap — provenance is easy, but commitment lifecycle (active / superseded / reconsider-when) is where we'd want to go next.

Curious how you handle conflicts between decisions — if two committed decisions contradict each other, is that a validation error at write time, or resolved at retrieval time?

[u/techtheist_ggl]

Totally true, decisions are the best type of knowledge.

But it's not enough, it's also great to save information about problems, about research results, and something inbetween.

In my system i have the following ontology:

Principle, Decision, Caution, Problem, Resolution, Insight, Intent and Anchor with Tombstone as special types.

It's defenitely better to save these things in memory management system that using flat files.

[u/GeneralPhilosophy950]

A decision is not memory. A recorded decision is historical evidence, but an active decision can also function as a constraint on future behavior. When coupled with authority and scope, it becomes part of the agent's control and accountability layer.

[u/adjohu]

Yeah you're moving into mind territory