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- Hacker News
- Just do what AI does to manage context: write docs, regression tests, content index, tools/skills, and CLAUDE.mdby 1337h4xx
- we've faced this same problem but thinking about it a little deeper reminded me that this issue is no different to pre-llm world. someone creates a spec, someone or a team build/implement the spec and after actioning any feedback from testing or from customers, the product evolves and is no longer aligned with the initial spec.
i think one way to solve this is having an someone or an agent update the initial spec with any new changes as and when they are made.
by tenzo - Isn't that the purpose of wikis? Not saying they work all that great but I think that's the goal.
I do like the idea of having a live editable wiki as the knowledge base a LLM can reference.
by lyfeninja - We still make sure to maintain a healthy directory and "backlinks". And as soon as new updates are in, we have someone on the team dedicated to clarifying changes and updating the Wiki - Confluence pages, Notion, which are adequately linked to tickets and shared drives where necessary.
This way, new and updated context is not lost on the next user.
by Tadace - IMO, earlier we used to spend time on the issue, analysis(RCA), confluence documentation, however, now organizations are spending dollars on AI and expecting Individual Contributors to use AI to deliver the product in weeks rather than original timelines.
This behavior forcing every individual to skip the other necessary activities like RCA and documentation and straightly trying to deploy the product into production.
by autoshiftops - > How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?
In my experience:
1. Well meaning people try to build wikis/confluences/whatever that turn into backwaters of slowly rotting stuff
2. Beyond a certain extent that they can hold in their heads, most other people give up.
3. Some people hoard knowledge and use it for personal advantage.
I dont know what the solution is. Maybe an ai that reads every chat and email and commit - and builds some kind of browsable, queryable, executable knowledge trove.
by andyjohnson0 - In my line of work (IT Operations for a large international bank), we came up with a classification framework that tried to gauge information along two axes: Importance and Frequency of Use.
Importance is the more obvious one - there is critical info you absolutely need as a basis to understand the system, then there is also minor details. The difference is in an emergency, lack of the former will break your attempt to fix the system, lack of the latter will merely inconvenience you.
The Frequence of Use axis is the one that brought value to our operations when we introduced it. That's the question "How often will I need this info?". Regularly re-occuring, detailled procedures need to be accessible easily, so they go to a prominent Confluence page. But then there is information that you will hardly ever need, some arcanae about the system that only the old timers knew but that needed to be fixed in writing.
The most vexing bits of info are those that are highly important but are rarely ever needed. Do you plonk them into Confluence? Might not be the best idea because then you don't know how to quickly find it when need be. So we had an extra category for just that sort of thing which became our go-to info hub for all sorts of highly urgent but at first intractable issues with our system.
by hash0 - Two things.
1. If it's not written down, it does not exist. This needs to be a ruthlessly enforced rule. I know we all love those Mel the Programmer stories, but that's a story about fragility. Similarly if you are relying on SRE or dev heroics to solve field problems, you have a gun to your head and you need to solve it yesterday.
2. The TCO of knowledge is dominated by the maintenance cost, not the creation cost. I see this mistake made a lot. Anyone can create a confluence page, Slack comment, SharePoint site or a git comment. The org must make it someone's job to grow, weed, and maintain these gardens. It does not matter what system you use, but someone needs to look after it.
You get a bonus for building information "data structures" that make it easy for people to pull data out as your org changes, but this is probably something you should accept that you'll get wrong as your org grows. AI hides this problem because it makes search so easy, sometimes, but it will come and bite you hard one day, so be ready for it.
by kjellsbells