LLM Planning

Memory is usually sold as the adult upgrade for LLM agents. Give the agent a past. Give it a vector database. Give it episodes, reflections, mistakes, summaries, and a long enough context window to remember every tiny embarrassment. Surely it will become more reliable. The RPMS paper is useful because it interrupts that comforting story with a less fashionable point: memory can make an agent worse when the world has hard action rules.1 ...

TL;DR for operators Enterprise agents fail less like philosophers and more like junior coordinators with access to the wrong dropdown menu. They propose actions that are not currently possible. They miss actions that are possible. They forget that an action changes the world. They treat impossible future states as if determination will somehow make them available. They add redundant steps, skip mandatory subgoals, or pick a next move that feels plausible but does not reduce the distance to the goal. ...