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Memory (Short-term)

The conversation history kept inside an LLM's context window during a single session. Resets when the conversation ends. The default kind of memory in most chatbots and agents.

How it works

Short-term memory is just an array of messages passed back to the LLM each turn. Modern LLMs have huge context windows (Claude Opus 4.7: 1M, GPT-5.5: 1M, Gemini 3.1 Pro: 1M) so most production agents simply keep the full conversation history. When you exceed the window, you summarise the older messages.

Example

A customer service agent's short-term memory is the conversation thread with the user. The agent can reference what was said 5 turns ago because all of it is in the context window.

Related terms

Memory (Long-term)Context Window

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