AI memory with biological decay (52% recall)
Details
- External ID
- 47914367
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- AI memory with biological decay (52% recall)
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 98
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8920308483290489
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Most RAG setups fail because they treat memory like a static filing cabinet. When every transient bug fix or abandoned rule is stored forever, the context window eventually chokes on noise, spiking token costs and degrading the agent's reasoning.This implementation experiments with a biological approach by using the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve to manage context as a living substrate. Memories are assigned a "strength" score where each recall reinforces the data and flattens its decay curve (spaced repetition), while unused data eventually hits a threshold and is pruned.To solve the "logical neighbor" problem where semantic search misses relevant but non-similar nodes, a graph layer is layered over the vector store. Benchmarked against the LoCoMo dataset, this reached 52% Recall@5, nearly double the accuracy of stateless vector stores, while cutting token waste by roughly 84%.Built as a local first MCP server using DuckDB, the hypothesis is that for agents handling long-running projects, "what to forget" is just as critical as "what to remember." I'd be interested to hear if others are exploring non-linear decay or similar biological constraints for context management.GitHub: https://github.com/sachitrafa/cognitive-ai-memory
Enrichment
- Theme
- specialized AI models and agent reasoning tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- ai memory system with biological decay
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is an experimental RAG retrieval strategy that applies mathematical decay scoring (e.g., Ebbinghaus forgetting curve equations) to vector/metadata database queries. Implementing custom decay scoring functions over an existing vector database (like Chroma or pgvector) is easily built with an AI assistant.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Google Research's Titans+Atlas, Claude Code's auto-memory, LongMemEval dataset benchmarks, RAG systems
Concerns raised: Wall clock decay penalizes users taking vacations, Memory systems in general may not improve outcomes for software work, Risk of comingling unrelated projects without proper scoping, Markdown files bloat and require manual maintenance, Every product launching long-term memory systems lacks clean breakthrough
Feature requests: Spaced repetition algorithm (Anki-like) for keeping relevant memories fresher, Per-fact files with tiny always-loaded index for on-demand loading, Filter on what gets written to distinguish globally vs locally-relevant information, Multi-step task context injection without per-turn recall triggering
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 155 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #17 of 156 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 171 days after the earliest competitor.
- A file-based agent memory framework that works like skill · hn · 2026-01-06 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- YourMemory, agentic memory is a pruning problem, not a hoarding problem · hn · 2026-06-07 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- PMB · hn · 2026-06-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Slowave · hn · 2026-09-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Living Memory Dynamics · hn · 2026-01-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Unify memory across agents and improve context rot, written in Rust · hn · 2026-04-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Memorable: graph procedural memory for AI agents. Stop re-teaching your agents! · yc · 2026-09-17 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Memograph CLI- A tool to diagnose 'memory failures' in AI agents · hn · 2026-02-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.