Journal article
A Lesson Is an Untested Counterfactual: The Three Claims Inside a Stored Agent Failure Memory, Which of Them Anything Checks, and Why Every Published Retention Rule Keys on a Proxy
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. An agent that fails a task and writes down what it should have done instead has produced a specific kind of object: a sentence asserting that a named step caused the failure and that a named alternative would not have. This paper takes that…