--- title: "Hierarchical Memory: Context Management in Agents — Sally-Ann Delucia" url: https://daily.dev/posts/hierarchical-memory-context-management-in-agents-sally-ann-delucia-banf0pbpf source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esY99nYXxR4 type: video:youtube source: "AI Engineer" published: 2026-05-10T19:01:15.400Z updated: 2026-05-10T19:27:23.025Z tags: ["llm", "ai-agents", "context-engineering"] reading_time: 16 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Hierarchical Memory: Context Management in Agents — Sally-Ann Delucia **[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 16 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A product lead at Arise shares lessons learned building an AI agent (Alex) over nearly a year, focusing on context management strategies. The talk covers a vicious loop of context overflow failures, why naive truncation and LLM summarization both failed, and how a 'smart truncation with memory store' approach (keeping head and tail of context, storing the middle for retrieval) became their working solution. Key insights include: context engineering matters more than prompt engineering for agent success, long sessions require dedicated evaluation (loading 10 turns and testing the 11th), and offloading heavy data operations to sub-agents keeps the main conversation context lean. Open challenges include long-term memory across sessions, principled context budgeting, and handling ever-growing conversation lengths. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Memory for AI Agents: A New Paradigm of Context Engineering](https://daily.dev/posts/memory-for-ai-agents-a-new-paradigm-of-context-engineering-ku2rvmlcw) · The New Stack · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#context-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/context-engineering) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/hierarchical-memory-context-management-in-agents-sally-ann-delucia-banf0pbpf)