Memento

A code diff shows what changed. It rarely explains everything the next maintainer needs: why the change exists, which behaviour must remain intact, and whether the available test results belong to the proposed version. This becomes especially important when developers inherit unfamiliar or AI-assisted code. Intent may remain in a chat, requirements in a document, and test output in a terminal. The next developer must reconstruct that context before making another change. Memento is a maintenance review workspace that brings these pieces together in a portable record. It serves developers reviewing changes, maintaining unfamiliar projects, or handing work to another contributor. The workflow has four stages: Changes, Context, Checks and Handover. Developers load the original and proposed versions of a file, inspect the diff, and record the reason for the change and the behaviour to preserve. Memento prepares a focused review prompt for IBM Bob, which the developer uses with the repository open in Bob IDE. For repository changes, a local recorder captures an explicitly chosen test command, its output, exit status, timestamps, and source-file fingerprints before and after execution. Developers import this record into Memento, which compares it with the proposed code. Evidence from different source contents is visibly distinguished from a matching result. The handover export carries both code versions, context, maintainer notes and attached evidence. Another developer can import it into a separate browser workspace, where the source match is recalculated. The prototype also includes an executable, single-process sample that exposes a retry change introducing duplicate operations and verifies a corrected configuration. Separately, a reporting defect in the sample repository was corrected and covered by a local suite reporting 32 passing assertions. Memento’s distinctive contribution is connecting the reasoning behind a change with evidence tied to its source contents, then making that context portable. It supports a concrete maintenance workflow beyond generating code or summarising a diff. The prototype uses browser-local storage. Imported command records are reported local evidence, not independently authenticated execution. Productivity gains have not yet been measured with users; the next validation step is to compare handover effort with and without Memento.