The AI coding category has spent two years calling four different systems by the same word. Memory. Context. Retrieval. Governance. They share some primitives. They optimize for different things. And the most expensive mistake an engineering team can currently make is buying a memory system and expecting it to govern. The AI coding category is awash in memory products. Letta. Mem0. OpenAI's memory feature. Cursor's per-user context. Claude's projects. Every agent framework ships a "long-term memory" primitive. They are all built on a similar conceptual core — durable storage of past interactions, embedding-based retrieval, opportunistic injection — and they all do recall well. None of them governs. That sentence sounds polemical and is meant to.…