Reasoning & Memory
Reasoning tokens, RAG pipelines, context engineering, and memory systems. How AI agents think, remember, and retrieve information.
Key Guides
Inference-Time Scaling: Why AI Models Now Think for Minutes Before Answering
OpenAI's o1 model spends 60 seconds reasoning through complex problems before generating a response. GPT-4 responds in roughly 2 seconds. This isn't a...
Vector Databases Are Agent Memory. Treat Them Like It
Most teams treat vector databases as fancy search indexes. The teams building agents that actually remember treat them as memory systems: with tiered architecture, decay policies, and retrieval strategies that mirror how memory actually works.
RAG Architecture Patterns: From Naive Pipelines to Agentic Loops
The naive RAG pipeline fails silently on every query that requires reasoning. From iterative retrieval to agentic loops, here are the architecture patterns that separate demos from production systems.
Context Is The New Prompt
Prompt engineering hit its ceiling. The teams pulling ahead now are engineering context: retrieval, memory, tool access, not tweaking instructions. Context is the new prompt.
The RAG Reliability Gap: Why Retrieval Doesn't Guarantee Truth
RAG is the industry's default answer to hallucination. The research says it's not enough.
The Budget Problem: Why AI Agents Are Learning to Be Cheap
The next generation of agents will not be defined by peak capability but by their ability to match effort to difficulty. Across every subsystem, the field is converging on the same fix: budget-aware routing.
From Goldfish to Elephant: How Agent Memory Finally Got an Architecture
After a year of ad-hoc RAG solutions, agent memory is becoming a proper engineering discipline. Four independent research efforts outline budget tiers, shared memory banks, empirical grounding, and temporal awareness: the building blocks of a real memory architecture.
The Prompt Engineering Ceiling: Why Better Instructions Won't Save You
On frontier models, sophisticated prompting underperforms zero-shot queries. The techniques that made mid-tier models usable are now making frontier models worse.
From Answer to Insight: Why Reasoning Tokens Are a Quiet Revolution in AI
OpenAI's o1 jumped from the 11th to the 83rd percentile on competitive programming. The difference wasn't better data or more parameters; it was reasoning tokens, invisible chains of thought that let models think before they answer.
The Goldfish Brain Problem: Why AI Agents Forget and How to Fix It
Stanford deployed 25 agents that planned a party autonomously. But most production agents today can't remember what you told them ten minutes ago. The memory problem isn't a model limitation; it's an architectural one, and new solutions are emerging.