AI memory with biological decay (52% recall)
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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
HN · launched Apr 26, 2026 · 98 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent memory infrastructure · 350 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -58% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 350 launches in ai agent memory infrastructure →
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 : 352 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #44 of 353 (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 0.57
- YourMemory, agentic memory is a pruning problem, not a hoarding problem · hn · 2026-06-07 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- PMB · hn · 2026-06-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- graphmemory · github · 2026-10-30 · 180 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- RAW-RAG · github · 2026-10-20 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Slowave · hn · 2026-09-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- OAK.memory · ph · 2026-10-24 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Living Memory Dynamics · hn · 2026-01-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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