How to Layer Agent State in Production

Away-Pollution3362 · reddit · 2026-07-15

The post suggests splitting agent state into three distinct layers rather than mixing them into a single "memory bank":

Run-local scratchpad: A temporary workspace for the current run. It's okay if this is lost, making Redis or in-memory storage ideal.
Durable user/workspace state: Essential user or workspace state that must be persisted, such as conversation history and preferences, typically handled by Postgres.
Append-only audit: A log of what the agent actually did and what permissions it had during execution. This must be append-only and immutable.

The author believes this separation eliminates much of the "which database should I use" anxiety, as most applications actually only need the second layer at launch. They then mention managed Postgres solutions like Neon, Lakebase, and RDS, posing an open question:

If persistent state will be used for evals or analytics in the future, should it be synced to a data warehouse/lakehouse?
Or should you query the operational store directly?
With solutions like Lakebase, do people prefer syncing to a lakehouse, or intentionally keeping the two systems separate?

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How to Layer Agent State in Production

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