I have memory disabled in all my Chat UIs (even though it tends to creep in, looking at you ChatGPT). It’s very helpful until it scales with time, at which point it becomes useless due to staleness or mis-application across contexts.

That being said, in coding over a longer time horizon, having the agent continually re-derive decisions/laws/facts/etc from your code is wasteful of tokens and time, and if your code doesn’t consistently apply them you can’t know the agent will make the correct choices.

You need memory of these important facts to avoid this expense or potential incorrectness. Memory does not itself scale though, without maintenance and pruning, and that has its own impacts on cost and correctness like the Chat memory.

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” at least until the agent can itself maintain its memory accurately - or some other non-human effort can achieve that.