Every AI memory tool I've looked at builds a knowledge base. Extract facts, embed them, retrieve on demand. Smart engineering, genuinely useful for some things.
But that's not what I need.
What I lose between sessions isn't facts -- it's the reasoning. Why I chose this approach over that one. The debugging chain that led to the fix, not just the fix. A pattern I noticed in one project that applies to three others. The stuff that's too contextual to extract into a fact, too valuable to forget.
I need a diary, not a knowledge base. And ideally -- one I can ask follow-up questions.
Think about on-call handoff notes. You read them. They're good notes. But you still have questions the notes can't answer, because the person who wrote them couldn't predict what you'd need to know. What you want is to ask them, not read their summary.
That's the gap. Most tools let you search text or retrieve facts. None let you resume a train of thought.
I haven't solved it. What I have is a dumb workaround: a hook that captures observations generated during Claude Code sessions and writes them to flat markdown files. When "Explanatory" mode is enabled, Claude emits Insight messages during the conversation, and the hook saves them. I never stop working to take notes -- they accumulate in the background. Crude, but it solves capture without breaking flow. Analysis happens later, with another model call. Yet sometimes, the model captures stuff that is far from the real insight.
And the bigger problem -- picking up reasoning where it left off -- is still open.
How do you carry context between sessions? Not tool recommendations -- I mean the actual workflow. Do you write notes? Grep transcripts? Just re-derive everything from scratch?