Archive: 2026
5 posts published in 2026
A-MEM: Zettelkasten for agents
An actively managed memory network for LLMs
The Zettelkasten method is a note-taking system invented by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who used it to produce over 70 books and hundreds of articles over his career. The idea is that every thought becomes a card, and the cards are linked to each other associatively rather than filed into categories. Luhmann described his 90,000-card system as a “conversation partner” because the network of connections would surface relationships he hadn’t consciously made.
I’ve tried it myself. It wasn’t for me. The problem wasn’t the concept (which is genuinely elegant) but the upkeep. For Zettelkasten to work, you need to invest time at every step: writing atomic notes, choosing the right links, revisiting old cards to update them. If you slack off on any of those, the whole system degrades. Notes pile up unlinked, connections become stale, and you end up with something worse than a simple chronological notebook because now you expect the links to be there and they aren’t.
So when I saw that A-MEM takes this exact method and hands the upkeep to an LLM, my first reaction was: genius or dumb? Let’s find out!
ActMem: when remembering isn't enough
Bridging the gap between retrieval and reasoning in agent memory
I’ve been reviewing papers on agent memory, since it’s one of the latest unsolved problems. Turns out there are multiple ways to take on this problem and I was hoping to summarise the most popular approaches, but there are too many and too extensive for a single post. So I’ll start with this one: bridging the gap between retrieval and reasoning.
The Chinese Room has understanding
It just can't prove it
I recently came across an article called Building the Chinese Room by SE Gyges. And it sucked me in. For real. It digs into John Searle’s famous thought experiment of the Chinese Room and argues that it’s fundamentally flawed. I went back and read Searle’s original 1980 paper to see for myself, and what happened next was unexpected: the more I read, the more I found myself disagreeing with everyone — Searle, Gyges, and at several points, myself. (Well actually, that is very me.)
The Art of Deception
Review of Kevin Mitnick's legendary book
I’ve read Kevin Mitnick’s The Art of Deception and so far my experience has been underwhelming.
Debugging? Where we're going we don't need debugging.
A thought on how we've been abstracting ourselves away from development work
I’ve been seeing a change in the overall community’s opinion of vibe coding. I wasn’t able to accept a lot of it but now I surprisingly find it… alluring.
For this story, we’re going to be going through the years across patterns on how software was built.