My agent kept forgetting what it was doing. A scratchpad fixed it.
The article discusses a solution to improve the performance of a research agent that was repeatedly asking the same questions. The author introduced a structured working memory system called 'agent-scratchpad' to help the agent track its progress. This approach allows the agent to maintain context and avoid redundancy in its inquiries.
- ▪The Hermes research agent was struggling with memory, often repeating questions it had already answered.
- ▪The solution involved creating a scratchpad that serves as a structured working memory for the agent.
- ▪The scratchpad allows the agent to track research progress and avoid asking the same questions multiple times.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/mukundakatta/my-agent-kept-forgetting-what-it-was-doing-a-scratchpad-fixed-it-m32 |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 21:21:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T21:37:40.575Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T21:37:40.575Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8sD9_k6UPlPE · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3915555) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Mukunda Rao Katta Posted on May 25 My agent kept forgetting what it was doing. A scratchpad fixed it. #hermesagentchallenge #devchallenge #agents #python Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge. My Hermes research agent was asking the same questions twice. It would identify a paper, start analyzing it, then two turns later ask if anyone had studied the same topic.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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