Memory

Garden · not yet reviewed Established: widely used Widely discussed since 2024-02

A feature that lets an AI carry details about you and your past conversations into new ones, so it can personalise answers without you repeating yourself.

Also called: ChatGPT memory · Claude memory · personal context · chat history reference · saved memories

Connections

Understand first

Ideas this one builds on.

• Context window (garden)

Evolved from

How the idea changed over time.

• Custom instructions (garden)

Related

Often used together or easily confused.

• Privacy and data (garden)
• Compounding loop (garden)
• Context engineering (garden)
• Projects and knowledge (garden)

Blueprints that practise it

• Teach your AI assistant your team's jargon, one confirmed term at a time (garden)

Resources that teach it

• Claude Cowork for PMs: My Self-Improving Productivity System (How I AI, with Daniel Blum) (garden)
• Tradclaw: a household starter kit for OpenClaw (garden)
• We Gave Every Employee an AI Agent. Here's What Happened. (garden)
• Build your personal AI copilot (garden)
• 20 Tips to Master Claude Code in 35 Minutes (Build a Real App) (garden)

Competency

• Use responsibly
• Describe the task

Find memory on the commons map ↗

You may know it from

• sales a client record in a CRM Notes from past calls mean the next conversation picks up where the last one ended.
• psychology long-term memory

In products

The same idea, under different names in different tools.

Provider	What they call it
OpenAI	ChatGPT memory
Anthropic	Claude memory
Google	Gemini personal context
xAI	Grok memory

In plain words

Each conversation with an AI used to start blank. With memory, the AI notes things worth keeping, such as your role, your projects or preferences you mentioned, and may also look back at earlier chats. Next time, it uses them.

This is the automatic version of custom instructions. Instead of you writing a profile, the AI builds one from what you say. That is convenient, and it also means the AI can remember things you didn’t intend it to keep, or carry an outdated detail forward (“you’re planning the spring gala” months after it happened).

Good practice is to look at what your tool remembers every so often, delete what’s wrong or sensitive, and use a temporary or incognito chat for anything you don’t want carried forward.

Example

A consultant mentions once that she prefers tables to long paragraphs. A week later, a comparison arrives as a table without her asking. She also finds the AI remembered a client’s name from a confidential chat, and deletes that memory.

How it connects

• It evolved from custom instructions: saved context, now gathered automatically.
• It works around the limits of a single context window.
• It raises privacy and data questions about what gets kept.

Try it

Write down what you think your AI tool remembers about you. Then ask it, “What do you remember about me?” or open its memory settings. Delete one thing that’s wrong or that you’d rather it forgot.

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Read this card as plain Markdown: /concepts/con-memory.md. Know a parallel from your own field, or a product that implements this? Add it.