Lessons tagged “documentation”
15 published lessons with this tag.
Externalize feedback you receive
Feedback you only hear once is feedback you will distort, remember selectively, or forget entirely.
Externalize your system itself
Document your process for managing knowledge — not just the knowledge itself. Your system should be explicit enough that you could rebuild it from documentation alone.
Explicit relationships replace assumptions
Writing down how two ideas relate prevents assuming a connection that does not exist.
Document your validation results
Recording what you tested and what happened creates a validation history.
Document your agents
Written agent descriptions can be reviewed refined and shared.
Delegation to documents
A well-written document delegates explanation, alignment, and decision context to the future.
Optimization logs
Record what you changed, why, and what happened — optimization without documentation is gambling.
Clean agent retirement
Retire agents gracefully — document what they did, why they're being retired, and what replaces them.
Agent documentation lifecycle
Documentation should evolve with the agent — outdated docs are worse than no docs.
Document your workflows
An undocumented workflow lives only in your head and degrades over time.
Workflow sharing
Documenting workflows well enough to share them multiplies their value. A workflow that lives only in your head dies with your attention. A workflow shared becomes a reusable asset — for your team, your community, and your future self.
Tool documentation for yourself
Document your tool configurations and workflows so you can recreate your setup.
Legacy through documentation
Writing down what you know preserves it for people you will never meet.
Team memory systems
Documentation, shared notes, and knowledge bases are the team's externalized memory. Without designed memory systems, teams lose institutional knowledge through turnover, forget hard-won lessons, and repeatedly solve problems they have already solved.
Documentation as schema preservation
Documentation is not just a record of what exists. It is a preservation mechanism for organizational schemas — the shared mental models that explain why things are the way they are, not just what they are. Documentation that captures schemas (the reasoning, the context, the tradeoffs) preserves the organization's cognitive capacity. Documentation that captures only facts (the current state, the procedure, the configuration) preserves information but not understanding.