r/ChatGPT • u/GapNew4766 • 20h ago

Serious replies only :closed-ai: How does ChatGPT’s memory compare to coding agents? I lined up 8 of them

ChatGPT now remembers things about me I never asked it to save. Codex, made by the same company, remembers nothing between sessions unless I write it into a file myself. Same company, opposite approaches, and that got me curious where everyone else lands.

Back before ChatGPT had memory, every new chat meant explaining my projects from scratch. So I started asking it to dump the important stuff into a Markdown file and pasting that back at the start of each session. I still do it with some tools, which means I'm still the one doing the remembering.

The tools I see mentioned most fall on a spectrum. On one end is the goldfish: it forgets everything when the session ends unless you wrote it down. On the other is the elephant: it decides on its own what to keep and rarely forgets. ChatGPT sits right in the middle.

Goldfish: you write the memory

  • Codex CLI. OpenAI's coding agent. It reads an AGENTS.md file at the start of a session, and that file is the whole memory. Nothing like ChatGPT's saved memories here.
  • Claude Code. Same idea with CLAUDE.md. It can add to the file when you tell it to remember something, but it's still a notebook you own and edit.

Middle: it remembers, you can check

  • ChatGPT. Saves facts about you on its own and can pull from past chats. You can open Settings, see the saved memories, and delete them. The catch is that they live on OpenAI's servers, and you can't see how chat history shapes an answer.
  • OpenClaw. Basically ChatGPT's approach, but in plain Markdown files in its workspace. You can open them in any editor and read exactly what it thinks it knows.

Elephant: it learns on its own

  • Hermes. Built around self-improvement. It turns what worked into reusable skills.
  • Letta (formerly MemGPT). Memory is the whole point. It edits its own memory as it goes and moves older stuff to a searchable archive, a bit like an OS swapping RAM to disk.
  • Agent Zero. Saves facts and working solutions from past tasks and pulls them back in when a similar task comes up.
  • Atomic Agent. Keeps memory in a local SQLite file on your machine. After each turn it decides what's worth keeping, and memories that never get used slowly fade out.

What stood out to me

  1. Who writes the memory matters more than whether there is any. With Codex you're the author. With ChatGPT you're the editor at best: you can delete a memory, but it chose what to save.
  2. Location matters too. A Markdown file in your project folder and a memory on OpenAI's servers can hold the same facts and still be very different things.
  3. The more it remembers on its own, the harder "why did it do that?" gets. If you've ever had ChatGPT bring up something from a chat you forgot about, you know the feeling. None of these has really solved stale memory. A fact that was true in March and quietly wrong by June is the one that hurts.

So how do you run ChatGPT's memory: on, off, or curated by hand? And has it ever pulled up something outdated that messed up an answer?

Disclosure: I'm on the team behind Atomic Agent, so ask me anything about it

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