Why I built Mento

I forget things. Not appointments or passwords — those I can write down. I mean the parts of my life I actually cared about.

Someone would ask what I did last summer, and I would hear myself say “not much.” That was never true. A lot happened last summer. I just could not reach any of it. The details had gone soft: a trip collapsed into a single photo, a conversation that changed how I thought about my work reduced to a vague feeling that it had been a good conversation. A year of living compressed into a sentence.

This is not a personal defect. It is how memory works for everyone. We do not store our lives; we store a handful of anchors and reconstruct the rest, badly, on demand. The moments that fade first are often the ordinary ones — and those turn out to be most of what a life is made of.

Journaling worked, right up until it didn’t

So I did the obvious thing. I started keeping a journal.

Writing helped in the moment. It slowed me down, and I noticed more. But as an actual memory, it failed at exactly the point where I needed it. After a year I had a pile of text I never reopened. When I did go looking for something, I had to remember roughly when it happened in order to find it — which is the very thing I could not do. That is the trap: a journal only helps you remember what you can already remember well enough to look up.

Keyword search did not rescue it either. I would search “burnout” and find nothing, because when I was actually burned out I never used that word. I wrote about being tired of a project and not wanting to open my laptop. The entry was right there. The search just could not see it.

What I actually wanted

I wanted to ask a question and get an answer:

“How was I feeling about work in March?” “What did I say about that trip?” “When did I first meet these people?”

Not a list of files containing a word. An answer, drawn from what I had actually written.

That is Mento. It is a journal, and it is a companion that has read all of it.

How it works

Capture has to be nearly free. If writing costs effort, you stop — and a journal you stopped keeping is worth nothing. So Mento takes whatever form is cheapest in the moment. Type it. Or speak it, and it gets transcribed and cleaned up into text you can actually read later. Or just tell the companion in chat — “save this, today was the day we finally shipped” — and it writes the entry for you.

Then you ask. The companion searches your entries by meaning, not by keyword. Ask about “that cozy evening” and it can find the night you described without ever using the word cozy. This is the part that made the difference for me: I no longer have to remember in order to remember.

One thing I was strict about: the companion is built to answer from your entries, and to say so when it finds nothing — not to fill gaps with plausible-sounding invention. A memory tool that quietly makes things up is worse than no memory tool at all; you would end up trusting a version of your life that never happened. So whether a search came back empty is checked in code, and an empty search is supposed to produce an admission, not a guess.

And it reflects back. Mento writes weekly and monthly summaries of what you lived through — patterns you would not notice from inside a single day, the shape of a month you already half-forgot. These turned out to be my favorite part, and I did not expect that. Reading a month of your own life in a few paragraphs is a strange and good feeling. It is the closest thing I have found to getting time back.

What changed

I still forget. Nothing fixed that, and nothing will.

What changed is that forgetting stopped being final. The moments are somewhere I can reach them, and reaching them takes a question instead of an archaeology project. When someone asks what I did last summer, I have an answer now — a real one, with the details still attached.

I built Mento because I needed it. I keep using it for the same reason.

If any of this sounds like your own problem, it is on the App Store. I would genuinely like to hear whether it helps.

— Daniil, maker of Mento