The book
Build With the Memory
The articles are the ideas. This is the system.
Your AI agent forgets everything between sessions. Every project starts over: the decisions re-argued, the gotchas re-discovered, the context re-explained. The fix is not a bigger prompt or a smarter model. It is a memory that lives in your repository, as plain files you own.
I'm writing the complete system down as a book. Why agents forget. How to design a memory network that survives compaction. How to make it part of daily work, how to search it, and how to build yours in thirty minutes. The book is being assembled by the system it teaches: the decisions behind every chapter are written down in the network that produced it.
Chapter one is ready today. The rest is being written in the open. One confirmation email first; unsubscribe any time.
One idea from the book, free
When you and your agent settle something (a library choice, a naming rule, a thing that must never happen again), write it down in a small dated file next to the code, with the why:
docs/decisions/0007-no-orm.md
Decision: raw SQL over an ORM.
Why: we know SQL, and the ORM fought our queries twice.
Do not: reintroduce it for "just one model."Next session, the agent reads that file and stops re-arguing the choice. No plugin, no database, no vendor. A five-line file you own. The book is the complete system built out of moves like this one: where these files live, how the agent finds them, how they survive long conversations, and how to search them.
Who's writing this
I'm Andrew Detwiler. I'm a working developer: a day job, a small game studio at night, and products in between. I built this system because every time I went to another session, the agent didn't remember anything, and I figured there had to be a way to fix that. The book is me writing the whole system down. The method itself stays free on this site; the book is the complete, in-order version.
What's in it
- Six parts, 35 chapters, plus book-only bonus chapters
- The full draft already exists: 50,000+ words, evolving in the open
- Why agents forget, the network design, the daily habits, the search stack, and the 30-minute build path
- Written with the system it teaches; the decisions behind every chapter are on record
Get chapter one
Want to read it early? Leave your email and I'll send chapter one, plus the launch price when the book ships. The method stays free at buildwiththememory.com either way.
You'll get one confirmation email first. Unsubscribe is one click, any time, and I never share your address.
No hosted database. No subscription. Markdown, links, and discipline.