Give Your AI Assistant a Memory

“The sky is ___.”

Go ahead, fill in the blank. You probably said blue. Most people do.

Now try this one: “Right before a tornado hits, the sky is ___.”

Different answer, right? Maybe green. Maybe an eerie yellow.

Same prompt. Slightly different context. Completely different answer.

AI assistants work the same way.

Context and AI Memory

One thing about AI assistants, they don’t remember things.

Every new chat is a blank slate. No memory of what you worked on yesterday. No memory of your projects, your preferences, or the decisions you made together last week. Every single time, you’re starting over.

It’s like 50 First Dates. Drew Barrymore’s character wakes up every morning with no memory of the day before. Every morning, Adam Sandler has to introduce himself all over again.

Your AI assistant wakes up like that every chat.

The usual advice is to get better at “prompt engineering.” Write better prompts. Use the right formula. But nobody remembers the formula, and even when they do, typing a wall of context at the start of every chat isn’t something anyone actually wants to do.

Let the AI Engineer the Prompt

You know who knows what context an AI assistant needs most?

The AI assistant.

You don’t need to know how to write the perfect prompt. The assistant knows what it needs. Have a conversation with it.

Think of it like two separate chats. One to set up the context: what you’re working on, how you like to work, what matters. One to actually do the work. You bring the context from the first chat into the second, and you hit the ground running.

Say you’re working on a React project. There’s a lot an AI assistant would need to know to give you good answers. The setup, the libraries you’re using, the decisions you’ve already made, the stuff that’s specific to your project and not some generic example from the internet.

You probably couldn’t list all of that off the top of your head anyway. And you definitely don’t want to type it out every time you start a chat.

So you have a conversation. The assistant asks questions, you answer them, and together you build up a complete picture of the project. At the end, you save that picture in your notes.

That’s your memory block. Everything the assistant needs to know about that project, in one place. Next time you start a chat about it, you paste it in. The assistant knows exactly where you are and what you’re working with.

Your Memory Journal

Don’t stop at one. You can have a memory block for each project you’re working on. A block for how you like to collaborate. A block that has your assistant walk you through your morning workflow. Whatever you need.

Save them all in one place. A folder in your notes, a few markdown files, whatever works for you. It’s your memory journal. Just like the scrapbook Adam Sandler made for Drew Barrymore so she could wake up every morning and know who she was and what her life looked like.

Except yours is for your AI assistant.

Every time you open a new chat, grab the memory blocks for what you’re working on. Paste them in. The assistant has everything it needs before you type your first question.

No introductions. No repeating yourself. No starting over.

Since they’re text files sitting in your notes, you own them. Nothing’s locked inside any one app or assistant. Switch assistants at work, no problem. Try a new tool, bring your context with you. Whatever AI assistant you have access to, your memory journal works there too.

It Gets Better Every Chat

At the end of any chat, ask the assistant what it learned. Missing context, wrong assumptions, things that clicked, things that didn’t. Paste in your current memory block and ask it to suggest updates. You confirm what you want, it returns the updated block. Copy it and replace the old one.

Every chat, the context improves. The more you use it, the better it gets.

You don’t need to be a prompt engineer. You don’t need to remember a formula. Have a chat and save some text.

That’s the whole system.

Want some help getting started? Check out Creating a Memory Block.