http://programmer.ie/tags/influence/ Recent content in Influence on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:00:12 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/memory/12-chapter/ Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:00:12 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/memory/12-chapter/ <p>Chapter 1 defined memory behaviourally: remove the past, rerun the present task, and ask whether behaviour changed and whether the change was an improvement. Eleven chapters later, that test has never actually been run. Chapters 3 to 11 built a pipeline — retrieval, structure, association, routing, lineage, temporal state, open loops, frames, derived consequences — and measured each stage against ledgers of what the context contains. During development, a later assembly experiment, reported in Chapter 14, exposed the measurement anomaly that motivates the behavioural experiment reported here: at a 768-token budget the assembled context holds required-evidence recall of only 0.72 yet the reader answers at 0.955 key-claim coverage, better than the full raw context at 0.879. Either the ledger overstates what the task needs, or the reader answers without the evidence the book calls required, or the metric gives false confidence. Answer quality alone cannot distinguish those cases. This chapter builds the instrument that can.</p>