Devin's newest change is that it has started taking notes. On October 5, 2026, Cognition announced Memory and Dreaming for Devin in an official blog post: Memory retains the preferences, corrections, and project lessons learned in a session so they carry into the next one, while Dreaming tidies that memory in the background every day. The standard behind the system, Agent Memory Repo, has been open-sourced at the same time, so other agents can adopt the same structure.
Memory is not a session summary — it is short notes with sources
The most tiring thing about coding agents is repeating the same preferences and the same project pitfalls at the start of every new session. Memory targets exactly the information that only surfaces while work is underway: an assumption the user corrected, an explanation of why a certain approach will not work in this project, or a workaround for an environment problem that took several attempts to find. Cognition stresses that these memories are not chronological summaries of sessions; they are lessons Devin learned while working with you, written as short notes with a link back to the session where each was learned, so they can be traced later. Memory is personal to the user — within an organization it serves that person alone and does not automatically become shared instructions for everyone.
Memory Drive: a memory vault managed with Git
The storage design is the most engineering-minded part of the release. All notes live in a persistent Git repository, the Memory Drive: notes are Markdown files, organizable by repository, project, or topic, while a short MEMORY.md holds general preferences and an index of the other files. At the start of a session, Devin brings only MEMORY.md in as context, then searches and reads specific notes with the same tools it uses to navigate code, instead of loading the whole archive into its prompt. Each session works on its own Git checkout, commits its note edits, and merges updates from other sessions; if a newer update lands while a sync is underway, a revision check rejects the stale write so it can retry, and conflicting edits are surfaced for resolution rather than silently overwritten. Parallel sessions can thus maintain one shared memory vault without any single session's local copy being the source of truth.
The four things Dreaming does every night
Capturing memories is only half the job; left alone, a memory store quickly fills with overlapping, outdated notes. Dreaming is a daily asynchronous background session that reviews past conversations and existing memory with a global view across sessions, doing four kinds of tidying: consolidating overlapping notes, removing transient details that only mattered in the moment, surfacing useful lessons that were never captured during the original work, and deleting stale records no session has used. Users can browse what Devin has remembered under Customize → Memory and inspect recent dreaming sessions, so the memory is not a black box.
Cognition also draws a clear line between Memory and Skills: a skill holds a repeatable procedure, such as the testing steps for shipping a change, while memory holds accumulated context, such as the user's stack preferences and the reasons behind them. Used together, the skill supplies the procedure and the memory supplies the background. Enterprise agent platform Cohere North 2 made cross-session memory a headline capability the same day, and although the two take different paths — one an organization-wide platform, the other a version-controlled personal vault — the judgment is the same: the next dividing line for agents is not how well they answer in a single session, but whether they can bring what they learned last time into the next one.
