Episodic vs Semantic Memory

Episodic memory stores specific past experiences tied to a time and context (what happened during a particular debugging session, how the agent resolved a specific error), while semantic memory stores general, abstracted knowledge (project conventions, API patterns, architectural decisions) that the agent applies across many future tasks. Episodic memories are most useful for avoiding repeated mistakes: an agent that recalls "last time I tried this approach it failed and required a full rollback" can make better decisions than one that starts fresh every session. When episodic memories are never converted into semantic ones, the agent cannot generalize — it will fix the same class of bug four times in four sessions because each fix was stored as an isolated event rather than compressed into a rule it can apply on first recognition.