The 6-Month Test: Why I felt like a stranger in my own code

A few days ago, I opened the workspace for the fault project.

I built this so I should know it inside out, right?. I mean, I spent a year of my life on it. I’ve written every architectural decision, every edge case, and every refactored functions. But I haven’t touched it in six months.

When the editor loaded, I didn’t see my work. I really couldn’t make sense of it, I couldn’t remember how to orient myself.

I call this the “Lost Effect.” It’s the moment you realize that while the code is a static record on your disk, the understanding of that code was a mental scaffolding that has since evaporated. It lived in my head I had stahed it in long term memory.

The Problem: We’ve optimized for Onwardness, not Orientation

Memory is funny thing we don’t full understand. But one thing occurs to all of us: with time, we need a greater effort to bring some context back to the fore.

We push forward on building more and more and contexts get push further away. So when you revisit a piece of code, that context has t bubble back up and it can really take some time. It’s also fragile and at risk of loss.

The more flexible our systems are, the more unique “mental maps” we have to build to navigate them. When we return to a project after six months our tools are mostly unabled to help us. So we are back to poke at the code until our context shows up again.

None of them restore the intent of why Function A talks to Service B only under specific conditions.

The Experiment (and why we stashed it)

Inside Unfault, we started building a “Recall” feature. The goal was simple: use the underlying code graph to “remind” the developer of their previous session’s mental state.

Technically, it worked. The engine could trace the paths and highlight the “Neighborhoods” of code that were most active six months ago.

But we stashed the code.

Why? Because we realized that a raw graph is just a different kind of “Navigation.”

It was still asking the developer to do the heavy lifting of interpretation. To truly pass the “6-Month Test,” a tool shouldn’t just show you the map, it should provide the Orientation Briefing.

It needs to bridge the gap between “Structural Facts” (what the API sees) and “Narrative Intent” (what the human forgets).

What’s Next: Building for “Ground Truth”

The philosophy of Unfault remains the same. We aren’t just building a faster way to find callers or impact. We are building a way to preserve the “Ground Truth” of a system.

We believe:

• Code is 4D: You cannot understand a file without understanding the time and intent that flows through it.
• Facts > Opinions: AI suggestions are often just noise when you are lost. You don’t need a guess; you need a landmark.

I’m building Unfault in public because I’m tired of being a stranger in my own repositories. If you’ve ever failed the “6-Month Test,” I’d love to hear how you orient yourself today.