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Comment by Fiveplus | Hacker News Reader

I liked reading this but got a silly question as I am a noob in these things. If explicit caching is better, does that mean the agent is just forgetting stuff unless we manually save its notes? Are these things really that forgetful? Also why is there a virtual file system? So the agent is basically just running around a tiny digital desktop looking for its files? Why can't the agent just know where the data is? I'm sorry if these are juvenile questions.

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> If explicit caching is better, does that mean the agent is just forgetting stuff unless we manually save its notes?

Caching is unrelated to memory, it's about how to not do the same work over and over again due to the distributed nature of state. I wrote a post that goes into detail from first principles here with my current thoughts on that topic [1].

> Are these things really that forgetful?

No, not really. They can get side-tracked which is why most agents do a form of reinforcement in-context.

> Why is there a virtual file system?

So that you don't have dead-end tools. If a tool creates or manipulates state (which we represent on a virtual file system), another tool needs to be able to pick up the work.

> Why can't the agent just know where the data is?

And where would that data be?

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/22/llm-apis/

Thank you

You are maybe confusing caching and context windows. Caching is mainly about keeping inference costs down

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