Memory as Metabolism: A Design for Companion Knowledge Systems

ArXi:2604.12034v1 Announce Type: new Retrieval-Augmented Generation remains the dominant pattern for giving LLMs persistent memory, but a visible cluster of personal wiki-style memory architectures emerged in April 2026 -- design proposals from Karpathy, MemPalace, and LLM Wiki v2 that compile knowledge into an interlinked artifact for long-term use by a single user. They sit alongside production memory systems that the major labs have shipped for over a year, and an active academic lineage including MemGPT, Generative Agents, Mem0, Zep, A-Mem, MemMachine, SleepGate, and Second Me.