Claude Code memory skips RAG overhead

Hot take: this is the kind of boring engineering choice that tends to age well in developer tools.

• –It trades “smart retrieval” for predictability, which is usually the right move when the system’s job is to help write code, not answer open-ended knowledge questions.
• –File-based memory keeps state inspectable and editable by humans, which matters a lot more than it does in consumer chat products.
• –The hard caps are the real feature: bounded scan, bounded context, bounded cost.
• –The “maybe stale, not truth” stance is healthy; it discourages memory from becoming a hidden source of authoritative drift.
• –The main limitation is obvious: this works best for preferences, project conventions, and lightweight context, not for large-scale semantic recall.