Ask HN: How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?

kkadhirvelm about 2 hours ago 8 comments

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With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc.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?

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andyjohnson0•35 minutes ago

> 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.

kadhirvelm•9 minutes ago

Do you think having an AI do that is 1) possible and 2) people will like that? Seems really invasive, no?

Tadace•about 1 hour ago

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.

1337h4xx•about 2 hours ago

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

midzer•about 2 hours ago

I organize myself in a some_project/ directory.

toomuchtodo•about 2 hours ago

Confluence, Notion, Wikis, etc.

kadhirvelm•about 2 hours ago

Do you all rely on people writing things down as they go? or do you have some automated system?

toomuchtodo•about 2 hours ago

People. Time is carved out for both documentation and its review, like a PR review. Otherwise, how would you trust what is being documented? A human must remain in the loop if accuracy is a component of success criteria for organization documentation. I say this familiar with Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern.