Long-Term vs Short-Term Memory for AI Agents: A Practical Guide Without the Hype

Author(s): Andrii Tkachuk Originally published on Towards AI. Over the past year, memory has become one of the most overused — and misunderstood — concepts in AI agent design. But before I start, I want to add a few words, most of us building AI agents today didn’t start as “AI engineers”. We come from backend engineering, data engineering, or data science. That background shapes how we think about systems: scalability, reliability, clear lifecycles, and predictable failure modes. And when we br