#Cognitive Architecture

Articles about Cognitive Architecture — exploring patterns, best practices, and real-world implementations in production systems.

1 post tagged with cognitive architecture. ← Blog home

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Pratik Dhanave · ·5 min read

The Memory Hierarchy of an Agent

Cognitive science spent a century mapping human memory into distinct systems — working, episodic, semantic, procedural — and agent engineering has been rediscovering the same partition from the opposite direction, because the same pressures produce the same shapes. The hierarchy isn't biomimicry for its own sake: each memory type answers a different question, is stored differently, retrieved differently, and fails differently. Confusing them is the root of most memory-system design mistakes.

Agent memory decomposes into four types with different jobs: working (the context window), episodic (what happened — read as history), semantic (what is true — needs revision, not just insertion), and procedural (how to act — evolves like code). They differ in storage, retrieval, and lifecycle, and most memory bugs are type confusions.

#Agent Memory#AI Agents#Cognitive Architecture#AI Engineering

All posts on this site are written by Pratik Dhanave, an Agentic AI Architect with 7+ years building production distributed systems, multi-agent AI platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure. About the author → Each article includes working code, architecture diagrams, and references to the specific frameworks and standards discussed. Browse the blog or explore related topics using the tag cloud above.