← All use cases
The scenario
You have solved this before. You know you have, because the error is familiar
and vaguely annoying in a specific way. What you cannot remember is what fixed
it.
Shell history has the commands but not the reasoning, and cannot answer a
question. The issue tracker has the ticket if someone filed one. Usually nobody
did, because it took fifteen minutes and fifteen minutes does not feel worth a
ticket — right up until you spend fifteen minutes on it again.
What this recipe shows that no other does: the memory is written by the
agent, unprompted, and read before the work rather than after.
Setup
MCP plus the Agent Skill. The skill is doing the real
work here — it is what makes the agent recall before starting a task and record
after finishing one, without you asking either time.
What changes
You debug as normal. When it is fixed, the agent writes down what actually
worked — not the six things that didn’t.
The next time a similar error appears, it checks first. You see:
“You hit this in March. It was the pgbouncer pool, not the gateway — the
recovery order matters: redeploy pgbouncer first, then the gateway.”
The value is entirely in the ordering. The same fact surfaced after you
debugged it is a curiosity; surfaced before, it is the fifteen minutes back.
Evals
This one is measurable, which most memory claims are not:
- Work normally for two weeks with the skill installed.
- Keep a count of how often a recalled memory arrived before you started
versus after you had already solved it.
- The second number being high means the recall trigger is too narrow — the
agent is remembering, just too late to matter.
- Spot-check three recorded fixes against what actually fixed it. An agent
recording its first hypothesis rather than the eventual fix is the common
failure, and it poisons the pile.
Guardrails
Never let it record secrets. Debugging output is full of connection
strings, tokens and keys, and an agent pasting freely will store them
verbatim. They are then retrievable by anyone with access to the space and
will resurface in later prompts.
- Record the fix, not the transcript. A blow-by-blow of a debugging session
is noise that crowds out the answer. One sentence about what was actually
wrong beats forty about what wasn’t.
- A wrong memory is worse than none, because next time it will be recalled
with confidence and send you down the path that didn’t work. Correct them when
you spot them.
- MCP tools load at session start. Adding the server mid-session changes
nothing until you restart.
Where to go next
The team-scale version, where what one person learns the whole repo knows:
Memory for your coding agent. 
