April 26, 2026
Forgetting-as-a-feature?
Show HN: AI memory with biological decay (52% recall)
Smart or senile? Internet splits on 'biological' AI memory
TLDR: YourMemory adds fading, human-style memory to AI assistants and reports ~59% recall, beating one rival. Comments split: jokers ('Alzheimer as a feature'), skeptics calling it a glorified cache with easy benchmarks, and pragmatists who curate past chats instead of trusting agents to remember—and misremember—stuff.
An indie tool called YourMemory says it gives chatbots a brain that forgets like humans do, using the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. It claims about 59% recall (beating one rival at 28%) and plugs into popular AI apps with a few commands. That’s the pitch—but the comments turned it into a full-on identity crisis for AI assistants.
The top joke: “you just made Alzheimer a feature.” The top fight: is “biological memory” real innovation or just a fancy cache? One critic called it marketing fluff and poked at a claimed “84% token savings,” arguing that’s typical for RAG (a way to fetch notes before answering). Benchmark drama exploded, too—folks questioned testing on a dataset they say is “easy to cheat.” Meanwhile, practical users said auto-memory has backfired: it muddies the task by dredging up old chats. One commenter swears by the low-tech fix: save past conversations, then paste only what matters. Another tore into the design: if decay is tied to real time, your bot forgets everything while you’re on vacation—shouldn’t it fade based on use, not the wall clock?
So the vibe is equal parts meme, math, and mistrust. Is forgetting a feature or a bug? Depends whether you want a thoughtful assistant—or a goldfish with swagger.
Key Points
- •YourMemory provides a persistent memory layer for AI agents that mimics human memory decay.
- •On LoCoMo-10, YourMemory achieved 59% Recall@5 (95% CI: 56–61%), versus Zep Cloud’s 28% (95% CI: 26–30%).
- •Installation is via pip with support for Python 3.11–3.14; setup downloads spaCy and initializes a local DuckDB database.
- •YourMemory integrates as a stdio MCP server with clients like Claude Code/Desktop, Cline (VS Code), Cursor, OpenCode, Windsurf, Continue, and Zed.
- •The system includes recall_memory, store_memory, and update_memory tools, with category-based decay controlling retention (strategy, fact, assumption, failure).