Notes on memory for AI assistants — how it works, where it is stored, and what the trade-offs actually cost.
Every assistant now has its own memory, and none of them share it. A remote MCP server is the part that fixes that.
A memory layer is a database of everything you told an assistant. That makes it the most sensitive thing in your stack, and the least documented.
Strip the marketing away and MCP is a small, boring protocol. That is its best feature.
"The AI remembers me" is doing a lot of work as a sentence. Nothing in the model changed. Something in front of it got good at fetching.