Most AI context products sell retrieval, compression, orchestration, or memory captured before failure. That is not recovery. This comparison asks one harder question: when the session is dead, stale, locked out, deleted, or untrusted, can the product reconstruct a safe continuation state without help from the old AI?
Quick answer: if a product needs the old agent alive, a daemon already running, or a note written beforehand, it has already failed the recovery test. ShardStitch rebuilds the next session from surviving project evidence.
Feature lists hide the boundary. We test code indexers, hosted memory, markdown systems, handoff prompts, transcript recorders, and agent control layers at the exact moment their preferred workflow is unavailable.
An index can explain the repository. A transcript can explain the conversation. Neither automatically reconstructs the unfinished working moment.
Capture-only products lose what they never recorded. ShardStitch reads git diff, changed files, commits, dependency risk, notes, and local memory, then separates verified facts from inferred next actions.
If you are searching for a Vexp, CodeIndexer, Mem0, Entire, SpecStory, or handoff alternative, ignore the adjacent feature count. Ask whether it still works after the capture habit, live agent, or trusted transcript is gone. That is the boundary ShardStitch is built to own.