Managing State Across Interactions › Glossary

State Lifecycle: The pattern of how state is created, used, and destroyed as an agent operates. Different types of state have different lifecycles, from ephemeral (seconds) to persistent (indefinite).

Ephemeral State: Temporary working memory that exists only for the duration of a single task. Cleared when the task completes or fails.

Session State: Information that persists for the duration of a user's interaction session, typically including conversation history and current context. Cleared when the session ends.

Persistent State: Long-term information that survives across sessions, including user preferences, important facts, and historical data. Stored permanently until explicitly deleted.

State Tiers: The organizational structure of state into ephemeral, session, and persistent categories, each with its own lifecycle and storage mechanism.

State Conflict: A situation where different tiers of state contain contradictory information, requiring the agent to resolve which takes precedence.

Sliding Window: A technique for managing session state by keeping only the most recent N messages or items, automatically discarding older ones to prevent unbounded growth.

State Inspection: Methods and tools for examining the current state of an agent, essential for debugging and understanding agent behavior.