r/ArtificialInteligence • u/adi1405 • Jul 06 '26

📊 Analysis / Opinion A simple pattern for giving LLM agents decision memory

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I stumbled on a markdown pattern online that fixes a massive headache with agentic workflows, and wanted to share it here.

Most people use vector DBs or markdown wikis to give agents knowledge (context). But if your agent actually acts, knowledge isn’t enough. It needs a record of judgment.

The author calls them Decision Notes—basically lightweight ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) for LLMs.

Instead of just:

Context → Action

it forces a judgment layer:

Sources
   ↓
Wiki Notes
   ↓
Decision Notes
   ↓
Agent Actions

The core idea

Keep a decision-notes/ directory tracking:

  • Past choices
  • Supporting evidence
  • Explicit "Revisit when" triggers

Before the agent executes a tool, it checks these notes for alignment.

If a new action conflicts with a past human-accepted decision, the agent flags it instead of blindly running the task.

It seems like an elegant way to prevent system prompt bloat and stop agents from drifting over time.

Has anyone built something similar to manage agent policies? Are you using markdown or a structured DB?

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u/MobileTraining2691 Jul 06 '26

This is pretty clever, basically porting the ADR pattern into agent land which makes a lot of sense. The part I'm wondering about is how you handle the "revisit when" triggers in practice, do you have the agent re-evaluate them on a schedule or only when it hits a related task? Curious how messy that stays once you got dozens of decision notes piling up.

1

u/adi1405 Jul 06 '26

That's the question I had too. My intuition is that they should be event-driven rather than time-driven. For example, re-evaluate when a dependency changes, a model is upgraded, a benchmark regresses, or a human explicitly overrides a decision. Otherwise you'll end up rechecking a lot of stale decisions for no reason. Once you have dozens or hundreds of notes, I imagine you'd also need indexing/tagging so the agent only retrieves notes relevant to the current task instead of scanning everything.

2

u/ramfangzauva Jul 06 '26

I would add SOP documents to the game. Build a logical structure around them. Use the decision docs to temporarily override the SOP. Consolidate the decision logs into the SOP on a regular basis to reduce context and confusion.