Published: 2026-08-01
Analysis & perspective

How AI agents "remember": the conversation is re-sent every turn

In a 30-second explainer, Tech With Tim corrects the intuition that an agent accumulates memory as it works. The model itself stores nothing between calls — ask it a follow-up without resending the history and it has genuinely forgotten. What makes an agent stay coherent across many steps is that the harness feeds the entire conversation back into the context window on every single turn. The agent is, in Tim's phrasing, re-reading everything that happened each time it runs. This is the mechanical reason context windows fill up over a long agent session, and why memory files and summarisation exist at all.

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