Filesystem Memory Audited
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Deployed agents increasingly keep long-term memory as a directory tree of markdown files they read, write, and reorganize with ordinary file tools. Research had mostly designed bespoke memory representations instead, leaving the default's two working assumptions untested.
Three roles, one filesystem: The setting is formalized as a management agent that integrates and organizes incoming content, a search agent that answers queries with cited sources, and an execution agent that supplies trajectories distilled into skills, unifying declarative memory and skills in one store.
Organization buys search economy: Across long-conversation benchmarks and embodied tasks, organized stores roughly halve retrieval cost when the material is large, which is a real and measurable win.
Answer quality stays flat: No agent in the study converted organization into better answers, and in the growth study the store degraded for every management agent except the strongest one, so the second assumption does not hold yet.
Why it matters: The tool harness matters as much as the model. Changing the tool set alone reshapes the memory store as strongly as swapping the model, which is a lever most teams currently leave untouched.
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