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COMPEL Glossary / short-term-memory

Short-term memory

The working context window an agent uses within a single task — prompts, retrievals, tool outputs, intermediate reasoning.

What this means in practice

Short-term memory is transient and task-scoped; its governance surface is the context-window content and the choice of what to include.

Synonyms

working memory (agent) , context-window memory

See also

  • Long-term memory — Persistent memory — typically implemented as a vector store — that survives across agent sessions.
  • Episodic memory — A form of long-term memory that recalls events from past sessions — "what happened when I ran last Tuesday" — analogous to human episodic memory.
  • Agent memory — The stored context, preferences, observations, and state an agent accumulates across turns or sessions.
  • Context Window — A context window is the maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that a large language model can process at one time.