Glossary

Agent Memory Decay

The gradual degradation of an agent's retrieved or stored context — stale reads, outdated embeddings, compounding errors carried forward from earlier steps — that surfaces as silent quality drift rather than a hard failure or a triggered alert.

It rarely triggers an alert on its own. It surfaces indirectly, as rising refusals, longer latencies, or cost creep — which is what makes it easy to miss until it's already affecting users.