Institutional Memory

Somewhere in your company, a decision was made a few weeks ago that will shape a product for the next two years. Four people were involved. It happened in a Slack thread, underneath a reply to an automated build alert, in a channel created for a launch that has already shipped. All four people would probably tell you the decision is documented. And technically, they would be right. The problem is that nobody else knows the decision happened. The person who will have to live with it may not even be in the channel. Six months from now, the same question will come up again. Someone will search Slack for forty minutes, give up, and the team will make the decision again. Probably a little differently. ...

On a recent episode of Aakash Gupta’s podcast, Oji Udezue ran a product idea through a viability gate he had built as a Claude Code skill. The idea was a tool called Standup Zero that reads Slack comments and assembles a daily standup digest. The gate scored it on six dimensions and returned three moderates. Problem clarity and urgency, moderate, because workflow convenience is not a deep problem. Target user definition, not strong. Differentiation, not strong. Competitive landscape, strong, which on this scorecard counts against you, because it means everyone can build what you are building. ...

Memory Is the Missing Layer in AI-Assisted Development In the previous posts, I argued that execution is no longer the bottleneck and that judgment isn’t intuition, it’s accountability. Those two shifts already change how we should think about building software. But there is a third layer that matters just as much and is far less visible. Memory. Not model memory. Not guardrails. Not rule engines. Institutional memory. The living history of why things exist. ...