You take a week off. You come back, open the repo, and for about twenty minutes you are a complete beginner in a codebase you wrote yourself. The function names look vaguely familiar. You're sure past-you had a plan. You just can't remember what it was, or which of the seventeen markdown files on your desktop is the one that's actually current.
If you build solo, especially with AI assistants doing a lot of the typing, this feeling is sharper than it used to be. The code moves fast. Your memory of why it moves does not.
Here's what I've learned: the thing you lost over the week isn't skill. It's context. And context is recoverable if you treat it like a first-class artifact instead of something that lives only in your head.
The trap: trusting your own notes
I keep a checkpoint document. After every session I write down where things stand, what's next, and the open threads. Coming back, that doc is the single most valuable file in the project. It is also a liar.
