Why does Devin forget my task context?

Devin forgets your task context because each Devin session is an autonomous run with its own sandbox, browser, and conversation, and Cognition does not persist structured project memory between sessions by default. Knowledge entries help globally, not per-project. The fix is to attach a per-project memory layer Devin's workflows can pull from at session start over REST.

Devin is Cognition's autonomous engineering agent. It plans, codes, runs tests, and reports back, all inside a managed environment. Three design choices push task context out of the next session:

1. Sessions are self-contained autonomous runs. Each Devin session spins up a sandbox, executes a plan, and shuts down. State held in the agent's working memory ends with the session. The next session starts a new sandbox and a new conversation.

2. Knowledge entries are global, not project-scoped. Devin's Knowledge feature lets you give the agent persistent facts ("use pnpm", "this repo prefers tabs"), but those are account-level guidance, not a project log of what was attempted, what worked, and why a path was abandoned.

3. Multi-day projects rely on the human to re-brief. When you pick up a project on day three, you typically paste a summary, link a PR, or point Devin at a doc. The agent does not remember its own prior reasoning. Cognition's session model is documented in the official Devin docs at docs.devin.ai.

The result: each Devin run is sharp on the task you frame, and a stranger to the project around it.

Every fresh session pays a re-orientation tax, and on multi-day work the cost compounds:

• Re-asked questions. "What database are we using? What's the auth scheme? Why is this module abstracted this way?" — questions Devin asked and you answered yesterday show up again today.
• Reverted decisions. Approaches Devin ruled out in session one quietly resurface in session three because the reasoning never persisted.
• Lost test outcomes. "We saw e2e/checkout.spec.ts was flaky because of seeded data ordering" is a finding from a prior session that you have to manually re-pin into the next one.

The fix is not "write longer task briefs" — it is to give Devin a project memory it can pull from at the start of every session.

Cognition has shipped three features that partly address persistence. None of them is project memory.

Knowledge stores facts and snippets Devin will surface across sessions. Excellent for stable rules ("use Vitest, not Jest"). Less useful for evolving project state, because Knowledge is global, not pinned to a specific project, and you maintain it by hand.

Repo and machine setup scripts let you preconfigure the environment so Devin does not re-install everything each session. They handle infrastructure, not reasoning.

Linking previous sessions and PRs lets you reference past work in a new brief. Useful, but you do the linking, and Devin does not automatically read the prior session's reasoning into its plan — it reads what you point it to.

The deeper problem is that task context for a real project spans sessions, machines, and teammates. Knowledge entries handle "always do X". They do not handle "yesterday's session decided Y for these three reasons". Multi-day, multi-engineer projects need a shared project log that any session — Devin or otherwise — can read.

Project memory needs to live above the agent run.

MemoryLake is a cross-model memory layer Devin can read from at session start over REST. Instead of re-briefing every run, you give the project its own memory and let Devin pull what it needs before planning.

• Per-project session log. Each Devin session's decisions, dead ends, and test results can be summarized into Memories pinned to the project. The next session starts with the relevant slice retrieved.
• One source of truth across humans and agents. The same project memory your team uses in Cursor, Claude Code, or ChatGPT is the memory Devin reads from. No more parallel briefs in three tools.
• 10,000× the retrieval reach of raw prompting. MemoryLake reads from billions of tokens of project memory and returns only what is relevant for this run, so Devin's context window is spent on planning, not on re-loading background.

MemoryLake scored 94.03% on the LoCoMo long-context benchmark, the top published result as of 2026, with millisecond retrieval and AES-256 end-to-end encryption.

1. Create a project and load your context. Sign in to MemoryLake, open Project Management, click Create Project, and name it something like "Devin — Q2 payments migration". Upload your briefs, PRDs, ADRs, and prior session summaries through the Document Drive. Add structured "what we decided and why" notes through the Memories tab so they travel with the project.
2. Generate an MCP Server endpoint. Open the MCP Servers tab inside your project, click Add MCP Server, name it "Devin integration", and click Generate. MemoryLake returns an API key ID, secret, and endpoint URL. Copy the Bearer token immediately — it is shown only once.
3. Connect Devin via REST. Devin integrates with external services through its workflow setup. Add a setup step or pre-session hook that calls the MemoryLake REST endpoint with your Bearer token, pulls the relevant project memory, and writes it into Devin's task brief or Knowledge before the run starts. Every session now opens with the project's history already loaded.