The architecture is in their heads. Keep it anyway.
Bus factor is not a joke metric. It is the list of systems you cannot change because the person who understood them left.
Read the film transcript
Narration from this original film. Soft instrumental music plays underneath.
The reason the retry limit is three isn’t in the code. It left with someone in March.
Architecture decisions and incident lessons fragment across repos and people, and the next outage repeats the last one.
Kept is a voice interview. June calls, asks about your work, and keeps what you say, in your words, in a jar that’s yours.
A new engineer opens the config and asks why it’s three. Kept answers from the March backfill and shows the exact words from the call.
Incident lessons and design reasoning stay with the system, not the person. Kept. Keep the knowledge behind the work.
Every engineering org carries systems that one person can safely touch. The diagrams are stale, the runbooks describe the previous version, and the real documentation is whatever the senior engineer says in the meeting. When they resign, you do not lose a seat. You lose the reasons.
Kept interviews your engineers about the work they actually do, in their own words, and turns it into memory with receipts. Ask why the queue drains that way and the answer cites the person who built it, on the day they said it. The workspace owns the knowledge. Nobody inherits a mystery.
Keeping a knowledge item does not promise permanent access to its original transcript. Sources can become unavailable after retention or removal. Check what evidence is available before relying on an answer.
Read personal and workspace controls. The overview above is available as text; explore the guided text walkthrough for a step-by-step example.