Build an AI Agent with a Hippocampus: Implementing Sparse Distributed Memory in Python

Article automatically generated from technical news.

TL;DR: LLM agents forget everything because their "memory" is a sliding window. Sparse Distributed Memory (Kanerva, 1988) gives you a content-addressable long-term store with an astronomically large address space — and you can implement a working core in ~150 lines of pure Python, zero dependencies. Why LLM agents forget everything Context windows are the bottleneck. An agent that worked with you last Tuesday has no idea what you agreed o