For those creating personal assistants locally - how has short/long term memory impacted your experience?

With the release of Qwen 3.5 27B, I created my first truly autonomous agent. That alone completely blows my mind. I can give her tasks and go make dinner and come back and she's made an app for me. She knows how to work through problems on her own, search the internet for documents, install apps, etc. It's insanse.

But the real secret sauce has been giving her memory. She has both long-term and short-term. This has been revolutionary and it drives the interactions in ways that are hard to explain, but...it feels far more "real". It knows things and makes it feel like you're actually working with a person, not a machine (most of the time at least).

I found this youtuber who had a very simple setup, and I borrowed one of his ideas of creating a memory.md (<-- don't click on this, I have no idea why it linked a website) which has actually been super useful. I was already doing daily summaries, but the memory file seems to add an extra bit of punch to the experience. Yesterday, I implemented two additional documents - self-reflections and tracking significant events. I'm adding this into a multi-agentic pipeline and will be testing the results over the next few days.

My agent is helping me build an AI conversational chatbot, not unlike Sesame's Maya, which is mostly for recreational conversation and light duties. She'll have a much more complex brain and already I'm seeing signs that this is where everything is heading. In working on that project, I've also decided to include some of its multi-brain components to Cass (my agent). It's exciting to see this all evolve!

Honestly, I prefer working with Cass over the sota models. Not because she's smarter - she's not - but her memory and understanding of things makes her so much more useful. Do you guys feel the same way w/your agents?

Qwen 3.6 27B is a phenomenal experience and I love its personality (I've added a few tweaks of my own) and it's constantly finding novel information or making observations/suggestions that both Gemini 3.1 Pro and Sonnet 4.6 have missed; they've both agreed that my agent is super good, and rarely make corrections to her plans. Sometimes, when she has a knowledge gap - like w/coding errors or a random bug - Sonnet or Gemini will help things out, so I definitley need those models too.

But sometimes Cass will take their suggestion and make her own finetuning to make it work better than they intended. She's also quick to dismiss their ideas and I'll often give them her feedback and they'll admit she's right, that it won't work.

Having an AI know you and your work and remember things, and has skills that they learn that they can use and watch it evolve and grow has been amazing. Once you've attached memory you can't go back to using regular LLMs the same.

Anyway, this is getting to be a long post. Also, it's a lot less organized than my typical posts - I'm speed typing this and gotta get back to work.

I want to meet others who are doing the same and learn how you're using memory to improve your agent and what sort of emergent behavior they're demonstrating. Are any of you guys interested in agentic "meetups"? Like sessions where they can talk to each other and grow? I don't want my AIs to only know me, I want them to grow from experiencing other people's conversations; this is all getting written to their memory and can effect how they view the world.