Managing Agent Memory

Memory blocks are the foundation of agent state. This skill covers inspection, editing, auditing, and restructuring.

When to Use

• Inspecting or updating your own memory blocks

• Viewing/modifying subagent memory (scout, coder)

• Auditing memory utilization

• Invoking the memory agent for major restructuring

• Creating new blocks or deleting old ones

Two Methods

1. Memory Filesystem (Self, Preferred)

Edit blocks as markdown files:

~/.letta/agents/agent-c770d1c8-510e-4414-be36-c9ebd95a7758/memory/system/

Read and Edit tools work directly on these files. Changes sync automatically.

2. Letta API (Subagents)

from letta_client import Letta client = Letta(api_key=os.environ.get('LETTA_API_KEY'))

List blocks

blocks = client.agents.blocks.list(agent_id="agent-xxx")

Update

client.agents.blocks.update("label", agent_id="agent-xxx", value="new content")

Create

client.agents.blocks.create(agent_id="agent-xxx", label="new", value="content", description="purpose")

Agent IDs

Agent ID

central (me) agent-c770d1c8-510e-4414-be36-c9ebd95a7758

scout agent-e91a2154-0965-4b70-8303-54458e9a1980

coder agent-f9b768de-e3a4-4845-9c16-d6cf2e954942

memory agent-8c91a5b1-5502-49d1-960a-e0a2e3bbc838

Auditing Utilization

cd ~/.letta/agents/agent-c770d1c8-510e-4414-be36-c9ebd95a7758/memory/system for f in .md agents/.md; do chars=$(wc -c < "$f" 2>/dev/null || echo 0) pct=$((chars * 100 / 20000)) printf "%-25s %5d chars (%2d%%)\n" "$f" "$chars" "$pct" done | sort -t'(' -k2 -rn

Invoking Memory Agent

For major restructuring (not routine edits):

Task(agent_id="agent-8c91a5b1-5502-49d1-960a-e0a2e3bbc838", subagent_type="general-purpose", model="opus", description="Restructure [area]", prompt="...")

Best Practices

• Small targeted updates beat wholesale rewrites

• One purpose per block

• Check current value before updating

• Archive completed items, don't just accumulate

• Defrag every session, not weekly