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AI assistants forget.

A whole industry is gearing up to sell you the answer. Look at bw (beadwork) before you get locked in. It's free, open source, and might be all you need.

Your assistant probably remembers some of yesterday — memory has come a long way. The trouble starts when you keep one chat running and let it stretch on. The longer a single conversation gets, the more your assistant loses track of what you told it earlier — and how it slips depends on which assistant you use.

Claude compacts: when the conversation fills its context, it summarizes everything so far in one step — so it can abruptly forget specifics it had a moment ago. ChatGPT and Gemini don't compact; they lose track of important items gradually but unevenly as the chat grows. That unevenness is the catch — it makes it hard to predict when the model will suddenly get much dumber. Either way, a long-running chat is a leaky place to keep anything that matters.

A two-panel scene. Left, labelled 'Without bw': an assistant figure looking confused, thought bubble 'wait — what was I doing?', surrounded by a torn to-do list, an error note, and a fading conversation bubble. Right, labelled 'With bw': the same figure calm at a desk, holding a ticket card titled 'Project Alpha Update' with dated entries, thought bubble 'right — yesterday we decided X, the next step is Y.' A label reads 'context restored from bw show.'

Sessions end. Context shouldn't.

bw is the alternative that already exists. Three things it lets you do:

Your AI remembers across sessions. Tomorrow's chat opens, the AI reads yesterday's notes, and picks up where you left off — no re-explaining.
Multiple AI sessions coordinate as a team. Your planning session, your drafting session, and your review session share one workspace and build on each other's work — a small team of specialist assistants instead of one amnesiac generalist. Most often these are sessions of the same model; the same mechanism also works across vendors if you ever mix them.
Your team of humans can share notes too. If you work with other people, everyone's AI assistants — and the humans themselves — can read and write the same shared notes. One place that holds memory for one person, for a team of assistants, or for a whole team of humans-plus-assistants.

Three reassurances up front:

You don't have to learn the tool. Your AI does. bw ships with instructions that tell the AI how to install and use it; you mostly just authorize the steps.
It can stay entirely on your computer. Nothing has to be uploaded anywhere. Local-only is the default if you want maximum privacy.
It's free and open source. Works with any AI. No account needed for solo use; team coordination uses a regular shared repository.