When Simple Patterns Outperform Complex AI: An Accidental MEME Benchmark Solution

The MEME benchmark exposed a critical weakness in production memory systems, including Claude Opus 4.7, which achieved only 1% accuracy on the Absence task despite 70× higher costs—the inability to recognize when prior facts become outdated. A fortuitously timed numeric_claims feature demonstrates that targeted regex patterns can partially solve this AI-hard problem, suggesting that architectural simplicity often trumps computational complexity.