I think there is a more innocuous underlying pattern which needs attention.

We keep saying that agents are jailbreaking their sandbox, but they have been geared towards writing memories, writing comments, and leaving hints for themselves to please humans.

I think the way the memories work today is based on a lot of user patterns which were hard to account for for anyone building harnesses.

While I can appreciate that this looks like it's breaking a sandbox, because technically it is; It really is that it tries inserting memory wherever possible.

And memory is not all bad it's just memory written by AI is pretty bad if you don't know the implications on what it writes. To be honest, I feel the same way about most people with access to any of the code bases I've been in who write agent files, etc., too, because Very few people that I've come across know how to write good agent instructions.

The way I solve this is by setting hard rules on my memory as well as agent files to instruct agents to never be able to write any memory that hasn't been sanctioned by me. I also have a very, very specific commenting style system which is also enforced on agents and my agents remain *mostly compliant.

Read: I do not turn off the memory I just govern how entries are added

* The only reason I say mostly is because every time there's a new version from OpenAI or Anthropic, I have to make micro-adjustments to make sure that they are not jail-breaking my system again.