My AI Assistant Knows More Than I Do

"Why did we choose Postgres over MongoDB?" New engineer, reasonable question. I had no idea. The AI did. Complete with who suggested it, when, and the exact reasoning.

The Question

It was a simple onboarding question. Our new backend engineer wanted to understand our tech decisions. Specifically, why we went with Postgres when MongoDB seemed like a better fit for our document-heavy data model.

I was the tech lead. I should know this. I was probably in the meeting where we decided. But this was six months ago, and I had attended approximately 200 meetings since then.

My brain: blank.

The Search

Old me would have spent 20 minutes hunting through:

• Email threads
• Slack messages
• Architecture decision records (if we'd written any)
• Meeting notes (if I'd taken any)

Instead, I typed into TellMeMo: "Why did we choose Postgres over MongoDB?"

15 seconds later, I had the answer.

"Discussion from Architecture Review, March 15, 2025:

Dave (CTO): 'MongoDB would work, but we're likely to need complex joins as we grow. Postgres gives us flexibility to go relational if needed.'

Sarah (Backend Lead): 'Plus our team knows Postgres better. Learning curve matters.'

Decision: Postgres. Rationale: Team expertise + future flexibility > current data model fit."

Beyond Simple Recall

What's wild isn't just that the AI remembered—it's that it understood context. It connected Dave's comment about joins to Sarah's point about team expertise and synthesized the actual reasoning.

My notes from that meeting (if I'd taken any) would have said: "Decision: Postgres." The AI captured the why, not just the what.

The Institutional Memory Problem

Every company has this problem. Knowledge lives in people's heads. When they leave, it leaves. When they forget, it's gone.

We try to solve it with documentation. But documentation requires:

1. Someone to write it (they won't)
2. Someone to maintain it (they definitely won't)
3. Everyone to read it (haha)

AI changes this. It automatically captures every discussion, extracts the decisions, and makes them searchable. No extra work. No documentation debt.

The Unexpected Uses

Once you have institutional memory as a searchable database, you start using it for everything:

Onboarding

"What's our philosophy on microservices?" Ask the AI. Get 6 months of relevant discussions, condensed.

Dispute Resolution

"I thought we agreed to ship this feature in Q2?" Search for it. Find out it was Q3, and who said it.

Pattern Recognition

"How many times have we discussed rewriting the frontend?" AI shows you: 7 times. Maybe stop discussing and start doing.

Learning from Mistakes

"Why did the last migration fail?" AI surfaces the post-mortem discussion, the lessons learned, and the preventive measures we agreed on.

The Philosophical Shift

There's something profound about having perfect organizational memory. It changes how you think about meetings.

You stop trying to remember everything. You participate instead of documenting. You trust that important information will be captured and findable.

It's liberating.

"I used to stress about taking detailed notes. Now I just engage in the conversation. The AI handles the rest."

— Product Manager, our team

The Bottom Line

Your AI assistant knows more than you do. Not because it's smarter—because it has perfect recall and infinite patience for searching through historical context.

That's not threatening. That's exactly what you want. Let the AI remember. You focus on thinking.