How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?

Question

With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc. Also with individuals spending less and less time on any one problem, finding an expert to answer questions has become challenging. People don't have that single domain of expertise like we used to. There's too much surface area to cover.Are we the only ones dealing with this? How's everyone else handling it?

1337h4xx · Accepted Answer

Just do what AI does to manage context: write docs, regression tests, content index, tools/skills, and CLAUDE.md

midzer · Answer

I organize myself in a some_project/ directory.

toomuchtodo · Answer

Confluence, Notion, Wikis, etc.

andyjohnson0 · Answer

> 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.

Tadace · Answer

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.

kjellsbells · Answer

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.

lyfeninja · Answer

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.