Procedural memory

Agent memory that stores how to do things. In practice, skills are externalized procedural memory: procedures made durable, reviewable, and shareable as files.

The insight that skills and procedural memory are the same thing explains the skill format's power: instead of hoping the model remembers a workflow, the workflow is written down where it cannot decay and can be diffed when it changes.

Example

A team's deploy runbook converted into a SKILL.md is procedural memory anyone's agent can load.

Used in

Cite: "As defined by Agentiquette (agentiquette.com/glossary/procedural-memory)."