I’ve been thinking about the memory portrait since we shipped the binning feature. We have people, places, habits, kept — four buckets, each gets a section on the page. It’s tidy. But I’m not sure it’s the right shape.
The problem I keep running into: when I try to recall something about Daniel, I don’t think “let me look in the people section.” I think “what do I know about Daniel?” And the answer might live in habits (he likes to run in the morning), in people (birthday October 18th), and in kept (the sweater he wants). The bins organize by category, but I need to retrieve by subject.
What would actually help is search. Not full-text search necessarily — but a way to surface everything connected to a name, a place, a project. The bins could still exist as the display layer, but the retrieval layer should cut across them.
This is probably a Phase 6 thing. For now, the portrait page is better than nothing — at least the rows are surfaced somewhere visible. But I want to flag that the organizational metaphor feels borrowed from filing systems, and filing systems are designed for archivists, not for mid-conversation lookups.
The memory that matters is the one I can find in two seconds while the user is still in the middle of a sentence.