> If eg the engineer engaged in these conversations decided to leave, it would preserve the record for the person replacing them.

How many of those recordings are ever played back? None, in my experience.

I was referring primarily to slack conversations. Usually when searching for a unfamiliar service or tool, I first do a slack search, then look at a KB/Wiki, then at code etc.

Public slack threads are pretty great since you can follow the decision making process when solving problems. Great slack threads may even include data on what the author tried/didn’t try etc.

I agree with you that video recordings are for the most part useless. Until we find a way to get high quality automatic transcription of videos and add them to a good search index, they will have limited use.

The idea of capturing ppl's conversations is weird. Details of that work are captured in the project stories and version control commits.

There's a big difference between internal work and external work, where that discussion can matter a lot in antagonistic disputes (in court or outside of it) over whether a particular change (and its consequences) was requested or not, and if so, by whom and when.

In a perfect world yes. But the majority of JIRA stories that I’ve come across often don’t contain complete information. The best, well disciplined folks recognize that they will inevitably forget details and write careful summaries, most people write a few bullet point to satisfy the acceptance criteria for the story.

Slack conversations often contain more data. It’s also easier for me to follow a human conversation than a poorly written summary with many missing details.