Agent memory stops hoarding transcripts: distilled claims with evidence still land in LongMemEval's top ten 99.8% of the time
VarOps built a memory system for AI agents working across an organization that distills each observation into a claim carrying who said what, when it held, and which source span proves it, instead of keeping raw transcript chunks. On LongMemEval, a public 500-question benchmark over long chat histories, this deliberately lossy distillation still put the right evidence in the top ten results for 99.8% of questions; ingesting about 35 million tokens cost $8.24 on two CPUs with no GPU. The system also makes time and absence explicit and resolves permissions before any model runs.