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Working Memory

Your agent remembers things between conversations using a plain markdown file you can read and edit yourself.

Where It Lives​

~/.wunderland/agents/<seedId>/working-memory.md

This file is created automatically when an agent starts for the first time.

How the Agent Uses It​

On every conversation turn, the contents of working-memory.md are injected into the agent's prompt under a ## Persistent Memory heading. The agent can update it by calling the update_working_memory tool — a full-file replacement with whatever it decides is worth remembering.

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Configuration​

Set a custom template in agent.config.json:

{
  "workingMemoryTemplate": "## Client Info\n\n## Open Tasks\n\n## Notes\n"
}

If omitted, the agent starts with a default template containing User Preferences, Current Project, and Key Facts sections.

The memory content is capped at 5% of the prompt token budget to keep context usage efficient.

Manual Editing​

The file is plain markdown. Open it in any editor to add, correct, or remove information:

vim ~/.wunderland/agents/my-agent/working-memory.md

Changes take effect on the next message — no restart needed. This is useful for:

  • Bootstrapping — paste project context before the first conversation
  • Correcting — fix something the agent got wrong
  • Pruning — remove stale information to free up token budget

Example Conversation​

You:   My name is Alex and I work on the billing service.
Agent: Got it — I've saved that to my working memory.

        [tool call: update_working_memory]
        ## User Preferences
        - Name: Alex
        - Primary project: billing service

You:   (new session) What am I working on?
Agent: You're working on the billing service, Alex.

Comparison with Cognitive Memory​

Working memory is a persistent notepad — it survives restarts and is human-editable. The cognitive memory system (Baddeley model) is a separate, ephemeral in-session mechanism that handles short-term reasoning slots and activation decay. Both contribute to the prompt simultaneously.

See Cognitive Memory for the in-session memory system.