When I started my new software engineering internship, I was handed a codebase that was, surprisingly, in decent shape. The code was relatively clean, the CI/CD pipelines ran green, and the test coverage was passable. But after my first week, I ran into a wall: the context was entirely missing.
I needed to make a minor change to how we processed streaming data. I noticed we were using a slightly unusual polling mechanism instead of a dedicated queue like Kafka. I asked the senior engineers I was supposed to report to, but the response was essentially a shrug. The original authors had left the company several months ago, the pull requests were titled "Fix data pipeline", and the Slack conversations where the actual decisions happened were lost to the 90-day retention limit.
The team was suffering from acute engineering amnesia. The code told me what the system did, but absolutely nothing about why it was built that way.
I remembered reading about Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and decided that if humans couldn't remember why we built things, I needed to build a system that would. I started working on Mnemo—an engineering déjà vu and pre-mortem agent designed to permanently index the reasoning behind technical decisions and inject them directly into our daily workflow.
