Why Does CLAUDE.md Keep Growing? Catastrophic Remembering in Agentic Coding
Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE. md grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repository retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale.
arXiv:2608. 11095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE.
Agentic coding READMEs like CLAUDE. md grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repository retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale.
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.
arXiv:2606. 27472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents operate over long, multi-session interactions in which facts change: a user moves, a price updates, a plan is revised.
This paper introduces a deletion interface for a pretrained language model, measuring how effectively deleted records are removed from the model’s memory. By retrofitting a support‑vector memory gate into the global attention layers of a frozen Gemma 3, the authors show that deletions can be performed without altering weights and that the resulting state is close to a reference state that never stored the record. Experiments on 4B‑parameter models demonstrate low perplexity impact and strong evidence that deleted content is hard to recover, while larger or smaller models fail to achieve the same guarantees.
arXiv:2608. 06811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resolving a real software issue with a large language model (LLM) agent is a long repair episode, often tens to hundreds of steps spanning exploration, hypothesis, implementation, and verification.
Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance.
arXiv:2606. 25115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-device language-model agents improve by accumulating experience in retrieved memory rather than by updating weights.
arXiv:2608.21964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over evolving software repositories, where success depends on repository-specific procedural kno...
Despite the wide deployment of memory in large-model agents, there is no unified formal account of what a memory is or when it is optimal. This paper takes a first step toward this account.
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
arXiv:2608. 07429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables language agents to reuse past facts, preferences, and task experience.