The book’s vocabulary

Memory stores

Notes, transcripts, indexes, skills: “clear the memory” must name the store.

From The World That Agrees With You1 section of the book2 related posts

“Clear the memory” is incomplete until you know which store is involved. An agent can retain: the current conversation, durable notes, stored transcripts, a search index, an external memory service, and reusable instructions or skills.

The same claim can appear in several of them. Correcting a note does not necessarily correct the transcript that supplied it; starting a chat can reload the same note; removing an index can leave its sources ready to be indexed again; a recurring task may use a skill that still contains yesterday’s bad instruction.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also

  • AI memory
  • Memory compression
  • Memory controls