Active Working Memory: The RAM of Agentic Systems

The article introduces Active Working Memory as a temporary execution state assembled before an AI model begins reasoning, analogous to RAM in computers. It argues that context windows are just the first layer of a memory hierarchy, with Active Working Memory being the second layer that populates the context window. The author illustrates this with a personal example of assembling documents before writing, showing how agentic systems similarly retrieve and organize information before processing.