The end of "Just ask Sarah"

>None of the three can easily be captured in code, but are trivial to capture as documentation.

Posts like this frustrate me. Not because of what they ask, but because of what they incorrectly assume. They assume that documentation can provide enough context, and that human knowledge is not needed.

Every bit of written documentation can and will be misinterpreted. And perfect clarity is impossible. A well-written ADR does not eliminate all ambiguity, because there is too much cultural context around the writing of the ADR that attempting to read it from some other cultural vantage point leads to bad assumptions. We can find this basic lesson from reading law (2nd, 14th amendments to the constitution), history (what did happen after Muhammad died?), philosophy (what in the world is Plato's cave talking about?), or theology (how should we translate Ephesians 5:22-33 and what does that mean) outside its original context with other people.

Just writing things down and thinking an AI is going to later perfectly understand what the intent of the author is... patently ridiculous. I do not intend to dismiss the idea that we should probably document more, but the idea that the AI can just take our documentation and competently understand all the decisions represented in them is ludicrous.

As the 'sarah' for an org I'm golden handcuffed to, avoid becoming the 'sarah' at all costs it will cost you so much in your career. I am a founding engineer self-taught from it/software security to full stack dev, and I pushed so we aimed to higher better engineers than myself. When they came in it was a full rewrite, a new abstraction and going down the same paths I learned the hard way not to go down. I was pushed out of enforcing hard-earned business logic, and we are still paying for it. Everywhere from not accepting the inherent complexity of the problem and over simplifying software to trying to get same features we had from 3 years ago. This then has made me the scapegoat for why the new engineers made xyz decision, and was the one in charge of fixing the shortcuts, bugs and workarounds. I have received promotions for this to be in charge of the veterans that didn't listen to me, whom still don't until it's a fire drill. Joke among colleges is I was the first 'agent' our company had, endless work, just enough authority to do current task, not enough respect/authority to solve the symptom. I understand this is also a failure of my office politics and am improving, however its hard to balance blunt productivity, slow careful positioning and letting people struggle with items I don't recommend until circle back.

All organizations above a certain size have a Sarah. This I've learned first and second hand over decades (the second hand was a spouse whose job at one point was finding, interviewing, and collecting the knowledge of her's org's Sarahs).

Very, very few of these organizations have ever known, and fewer still have ever cared, about their Sarahs.

This isn't the end of Sarahs. Sarahs have never had their time or place beyond immediate teams, many of which have used Fight Club rules when it came to their Sarah: Never talk about Sarah, especially not to the boss. Other, non Fight Club rules: When Sarah is away, cover as best you can. Change jobs before Sarah retires. It is not the end, because the time of Sarahs never began.

So I agree with ";dr" comment, but it would apply had this been written by a human, by AI, by a super-intelligent shade of blue, or a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Simon should ask Sarah how to write an article without relying on an LLM

It's already quite feasible to record meetings and get AI summaries. As that works better, it will become more widespread.

This article fails to mention Sarah burned out and is now a barista.

Besides documentation, you can commit your chat sessions in git notes e.g. with https://usegitai.com/

> We’ve all been in that 30-minute meeting that could just as well have been a two-paragraph ADR, if anyone would have bothered writing the decision down as it happened. Organizations learned to run on oral tradition because the alternative required discipline that was hard to reward, and not documenting it properly rarely turned into a real problem - at least not immediately. With agents, on the other hand, the full cost of a missing paper trail is paid every time the session terminates.

I just think this is entirely wrong. Oral tradition is valuable because it's flexible in a way that written tradition struggles to be. Just a handful of oral-tradition decisions I routinely see that could never be written up as persistent documentation:

* The CEO said X is our top priority, but we think Y is more important and we can do it without compromising too much on X, so we're going to do both.

* Team A has a track record of quality and success, so their decisions are subject to less review and receive more deference

* Team B is sloppy and makes a lot of bad calls, so we don't trust their judgments when doing so might lead to an outage for us.

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ai;dr