Learning from Experience — Procedural Memory and Agents That Get Better
Everything before this post helps an agent remember; this one asks whether it can improve. The difference is procedural: an agent that recalls last week's failed deploy has memory, while an agent that deploys differently because of it has learned. Procedural learning is the highest-leverage loop in agent engineering — every improvement compounds across all future tasks — and the most dangerous, for exactly the same reason. The craft is building the loop with brakes.
Learning without weight changes lands in artifacts: rules, playbooks, worked examples, failure memory. The loop breaks at misattribution, overgeneralization, rot, and conflict — and procedural writes deserve deploy-grade brakes: proposal review, provenance, blast-radius scoping, regression evals. Start with failure memory and worked examples; they compound at a fraction of the risk.