Memory should accumulate judgment
Transcripts preserve history. Useful memory changes the next decision.
Most agent memory systems begin by storing conversation. That solves continuity, but continuity is the least interesting form of organizational memory.
A rollout reviewer does not mainly need to remember what everybody said. It needs to remember that a latency spike on this service is normal during cache warming, that the previous rollback was caused by a dependency absent from the original topology, and that a particular metric looked healthy because telemetry coverage had fallen.
Useful memory compresses experience into future decision value.
That means preserving precedent with conditions: what happened, what evidence was available, which decision followed, what the eventual outcome was, and why the precedent does or does not transfer to the present case.
Without those conditions, memory becomes anecdote retrieval. With them, it begins to accumulate judgment.