Oh Memories, Where'd You Go

A product manager at Weaviate spent two weeks dogfooding Engram, Weaviate's memory product for AI coding assistants, integrated with Claude Code via an MCP server. The key finding: Claude ignored Engram entirely when given discretion, defaulting to its built-in MEMORY.md file. The post details why this happened, how structured memory topics and deterministic retrieval hooks solve it, where Engram genuinely added value (decision archaeology, preventing hallucinations), and where it failed (forward-looking planning tasks). It also covers session overhead issues, the case for infrastructure-level memory injection rather than LLM-decided recall, and open problems around team collaboration scope and cold-start bootstrapping.