07 RAG and Memory

Phase 2 - Agent Core
Stage 7 of 14. Previous: Stage 6 - MCP. Next: Stage 8 - Agent Architectures.

Goal

Learn how agents retrieve knowledge and maintain useful state across interactions.

Learn

• RAG basics
• Embeddings and vector search
• Vector databases, SQL, and custom stores
• Short-term and long-term memory
• Episodic and semantic memory
• User profile storage
• Summarization, compression, and forgetting

Build

Build a knowledge agent that answers questions from documents with citations and remembers selected user preferences.

Exit Criteria

• You can explain the difference between retrieval and memory.
• You can choose a storage backend for a memory use case.
• You can measure retrieval quality with test questions.

Checkpoint

Use the Stage 7 checkpoint before moving on.