Every Agent builder hits this question eventually: where do I store user data so the agent remembers it next session?
Three approaches dominate the landscape: RAG (vector retrieval), LLM Wiki (structured knowledge injection), and plain-text context memory (the CLAUDE.md / Cursor Rules pattern). Each has vocal advocates. But picking wrong is expensive — do RAG too light and it’s a noise generator; do plain text too heavy and it’s a token incinerator.
This is not AI科普. This is a cross-validated research sprint backed by 67 primary sources — vendor docs, arXiv papers, and researcher interviews — on a question every Agent builder hits: why don’t LLMs remember anything?
→ Full report: 14-product comparison table, 9 engineering takeaways, 3-year paradigm roadmap
The One-Liner # Four independent constraints — O(n²) attention + KV cache VRAM + catastrophic forgetting + GDPR right-to-be-forgotten — stacked together leave “stateless” as the only viable engineering solution. Every “Memory” feature you’ve seen (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor) is structured text injected into the system prompt. Zero weight modification. The next 1–3 years belong to stateless LLM kernels + stateful Agent memory layers.
1. Why LLMs Are Stateless # Four independent constraints — individually manageable, together they leave “stateless” as the only viable engineering solution. This conclusion is cross-validated across 67 primary sources.
Architecture: O(n²) Attention # Self-attention scales at O(n²). A single 4096-token sequence needs 2 GB VRAM for KV cache; 32 concurrent sessions hit 64 GB — more than the model weights themselves. Llama 3.1 at 100M context requires 638 H100 GPUs ($5,400/hour) for KV cache alone.