A few weeks ago I spent twenty minutes hunting for a ChatGPT conversation I knew existed.
It was a debugging session. The model and I had traced a race condition in a KV cache layer — and the final write-up was genuinely good: why the bug only fired under concurrent writes, the fix, and a checklist for avoiding that whole class of bug. Three weeks and a hundred chats later, ChatGPT's search couldn't surface it. I re-derived everything from scratch.
That's when it hit me: AI chat is where a growing share of my real engineering work happens — and it's the worst archive I own.
We're producing work in a place designed to lose it
Think about what's sitting in your ChatGPT (or Claude) history right now:
