Most digital technologies help us create more traces of our lives. Far fewer help us make sense of the ones we already have. This essay begins with a grandson sitting beside his grandmother, trying to identify the people in 1,351 loose family photographs, and unfolds into a much larger exploration of memory, identity, and the challenge of preserving a life in an age of endless data. Along the way, it introduces WhoAmI, an open-source tool that uses locally run AI agents to transform photos, messages, location histories, and other digital archives into a browsable encyclopedia of your own life. What makes the project compelling isn't the technology itself so much as the possibility that AI might help us recover forgotten friendships, reconnect scattered memories, and become better stewards of our own stories.
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