TLDR Tech / Founders
How Long Should an AI Agent Live?
How long your AI agent stays alive between resets is a product decision, and the data here says the long-lived ones quietly forget their instructions. This essay proposes a coordinator agent that lives a day, specialist agents that live about 30 seconds, and state written to ordinary files rather than held in the agent's head. It cites research where squeezing a conversation down to fit dropped standing rules in 30 to 59% of runs. Memory quality falls as it grows across every frontier model tested. Memory carried between sessions is also somewhere an attacker can plant text.
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