Procedural Memory

Procedural memory is memory of how to do something — implicit knowledge tied to learned routines and skills. It originated in cognitive science as the third pillar alongside episodic and semantic memory. In LLM agents, procedural memory shows up as learned tool-use patterns ("when the user says 'do the usual,' run this 4-step sequence"), prompt templates the agent reaches for in specific situations, and few-shot example stores the agent retrieves before generating. Most agents fake procedural memory by stuffing static examples into the system prompt; a real procedural-memory layer learns and updates patterns from interaction over time.