Agentic Context Management: Memory and Cost as Architecture Problems

[Submitted connected 23 Jul 2026]

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Production AI agents' failures are little often owed to an inability to logic good and much often because they cannot negociate what is successful their reasoning context: speech histories, ample prompts, ample instrumentality definitions, and ballooning instrumentality outputs. Agents drown successful their ain accumulating history while paying a token costs that grows each turn, producing missing recalls wrong and crossed conversations. The incumbent consequence treats this arsenic a storage-and-retrieval problem. We reason that framing is excessively narrow. Actively managing what an supplier holds successful mind is simply a lifecycle, not simply a store: it spans deciding what to remember, extracting and structuring it, choosing the correct shop per information type, consolidating and forgetting while preserving provenance, deciding what is applicable now, anticipating what is needed next, and compacting discourse to a fund without losing what matters. In superior accumulation this operates not complete a azygous personification but crossed an organizational scope hierarchy. We sanction this subject Agentic Context Management (ACM) and decompose it into 5 primitives: architecting, ingesting, scoping, anticipating, and compacting & consolidation. We past make the economical case: naive discourse accumulation grows token costs quadratically successful speech length, crude summarization buys linear costs astatine the value of an accuracy cliff, and only validated compaction achieves linear costs pinch preserved fidelity. We picture a reference implementation, Maximem Synap, that realizes the 5 primitives arsenic a multi-tenant work and reports 92% connected LongMemEval and 93.2% connected LoCoMo nether the configuration elaborate successful Section 6. We adjacent pinch dimensions existing benchmarks do not yet capture, latency, token efficiency, and context-rot resistance, and the frontier of decision-level and organization-level discourse the class points toward.