---
title: "Memory-first · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/archive/
description: "Concentric memory rings with retrieval filaments."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Memory-first

Concentric memory rings with retrieval filaments.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

A memory-first agent puts retrieval at the centre: before it reasons it pulls the relevant records from a store, and it writes structured memory back as it goes. The store, not the prompt, is the source of truth, so the agent's quality tracks the quality and freshness of what it has indexed. This is the shape behind research and knowledge agents, where grounding in a corpus matters more than raw reasoning. In anatomy terms the memory plane is load-bearing and the reasoning core orbits it.

## In the anatomy

The memory and retrieval plane is central; the reasoning core reads from and writes to it each turn; retrieval filaments (RAG, GraphRAG) feed the context; the perimeter governs what may be indexed and returned.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Memory-first |
| State model | durable |
| Example | RAG / research agents |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Agents using this pattern · 9

Mapping classified by the Field Book from each agent's documented control flow.

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08560)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.