The record nobody remembers to keep
Asking people to keep a record is asking them to do a second job alongside the first. The only records that survive are the ones something else writes down for you.
Why good intentions do not survive
Writing down what you changed is easy to agree to and hard to sustain. It is extra work at the exact moment you are trying to finish something else, and the cost of skipping it is invisible until much later.
So the record gets kept carefully for a fortnight, patchily for a month, and then not at all.
What changes when it is automatic
If the record is written as the change happens, nobody has to remember. There is no discipline to maintain and no gap where a busy week used to be.
It also becomes trustworthy, which matters more than completeness. A record with holes in it is worse than none, because you cannot tell which parts to believe.
Reading it later
A record is only useful if someone can answer a question with it. Who changed this, when, and what did it look like before — those are the questions people actually ask, usually under time pressure.
So the record is written to be read by a person, in order, in plain language, rather than as a log for a machine.
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