After a few months running long projects with AI agents (some spanning weeks, with multiple specialist agents touching the same files), I kept hitting the same failure mode. The specialists were fine at their narrow task. What broke down was project memory. Decisions made in week 1 were lost by week 4. Rejected options got quietly revived. The "single source of truth" was always whichever chat happened to be open.
I started looking at how this gets handled in places that have been doing long-running work for decades. Consulting firms run engagements that last months with rotating people, and they survive through a transformation office or PMO: cadence, decision logs, risk registers, one canonical current-state artifact, an engagement manager who frames problems and delegates workstreams. The interesting part is the operating model, not the consulting theater.
There is also a relevant academic thread. Kasvi et al. (2003) distinguish project memory (the knowledge available to inform current work) from the project-memory system (storage, retrieval, dissemination, use). Mariano and Awazu (2024) treat project memory as an active practice rather than a repository. On the LLM side, Anthropic's multi-agent research system, the OpenAI Agents SDK handoff pattern, and recent work like LEGOMem and AgentSys point at orchestrator-worker patterns with hierarchical or modular memory.
The hypothesis I wrote up is narrow. Durable memory should live with the project owner. Task specialists should receive minimal, scoped context. The unit of persistence is the project folder, not the conversation. A persistent "PM soul" maintains the canonical memory, frames ambiguous requests, decomposes work, writes compact handoff briefs to specialists, verifies returned work, and only writes evidence-backed facts into memory.
The repo is a scaffold, not a validated result. It contains an agent contract, templates for the memory file and the handoff brief, a consulting-workflow map with sources, a case study, and an evaluation rubric (repeated-context events, handoff brief length, decision closure time, specialist rework loops, and so on). The next step is a one-week field trial on a live project before claiming anything.
The thing I would most like pushback on is the memory boundary. The current rule is that specialists do not see the full project history, only the handoff brief plus the files they need. I am not sure where that breaks. My suspicion is that on tasks where the specialist needs to know why a previous option was rejected, the brief will quietly grow until it becomes the full memory again. Curious whether anyone has run into that, or solved it differently.
[link] [comments]