Memory Decisions & Worked Examples
When to use which memory type, with three real-world scenarios: customer support, sales agent, and code assistant.
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After this section you can
- Use the tradeoff matrix to pick a memory design for a concrete product
- Work through support, sales, and coding-assistant scenarios and defend each choice
Memory Decisions & Worked Examples
Which memory type for which job — a decision tree you can defend, a tradeoff matrix, and three real systems (support, sales, code assistant) traced end to end from write to retrieval.
Knowing the four layers and three types is table stakes. The skill that gets you hired is choosing — and, more often, choosing to not add memory at all. Most “we need memory” requests are actually “we need to pass state within a session” (short-term, cheap) or “we need company facts” (that’s RAG, already solved). True cross-session per-user memory is powerful, and it is the expensive, privacy-laden, hard-to-evaluate option. This section is about matching the mechanism to the actual need — and knowing when the answer is “none.”