I reverse-engineered the three biggest agent-memory tools

A developer reverse-engineered three major agent-memory tools—Cognee, Graphiti, and Neo4j's agent-memory—finding they all rely on heavy knowledge-graph architectures. The author argues such infrastructure is overkill for personal or small-scale use, preferring simpler setups like Obsidian and LLM wikis, while acknowledging the value of graph-based tools for medium-to-large scale products.

I spent weeks reading about how Cognee, Graphiti, and Neo4j's agent-memory build their agent memory architectures. They converged on the same heavy knowledge-graph design: an ontology, LLM extraction pipelines, deduplication, the works. I really wanted to use them for my personal use case, but that looks like such a heavy setup that adds a lot of friction and silos. Plus, it feels like I just get my data trapped in their service, for not a ton of value. That's why my "long-term memory" still lives in Obsidian, Readwise, and Google Drive, with per-project LLM wikis as the agent's memory. No infrastructure. And I'm fine with it. They ship memory as a product, which, in my opinion, at a personal or small scale, is overkill. You can build the same "knowledge graph" experience via plain old .md files within an LLM wiki memory. But still, graphs are strong, so I adapted the same architecture from the Cognee, Graphiti, and Neo4j agent-memory stacks to build a data-mining tool with just MongoDB, VoyageAI, and Gemini Flash. But I scoped it to a very particular problem and ontology domain to avoid the KG noise. On the other end of the spectrum, if you want to ship a product at medium-to-large scale, it makes sense to start using monsters such as Neo4j, Zep, or HydraDB. But I am curious: what is your long-term memory setup? Obsidian + LLM wikis vs. Cognee/Graphiti/Zep? Do you actually use tools such as Cognee or Zep? In case you are curious about how Cognee, Graphiti, and Neo4j's agent-memory work under the hood, I wrote a full breakdown here: https://www.decodingai.com/p/unified-memory-from-scratch-knowledge-graphs Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48919162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48919162 Points: 1 Comments: 0