Things Dave Says on Podcasts

Yeah. And we have been in a period of the last couple years where you're allowed to blame Claude. You're allowed to blame the agents if something goes wrong. But as a few performance review cycles come around, people realize like, oh, I own reliability and my team's docs went down or some other team's docs caused it that were written by Claude, but I own reliability. I'm getting dinged in performance reviews. All of a sudden, they're going to start to care. Things aren't going to be as like as laissez-faire and YOLO as before of just like trading, you know, blindly trading what Claude says, blindly publishing it, because now you're responsible. So that's the when people ask me about docs, like what tool should we use? What should we do a style guide? I'm like, start with accountability because if you put a name to a doc set, just like a code base or a repo, people will figure it out how to care. And the next step of that is during performance reviews, like put it on the job ladder. Like, are you responsible for the documentation? People will figure it out. It will all cascade. Like, smart people will figure it out. And I think that's just kind of been blown up the last…

Yeah, absolutely. And code is pretty pristine. That's what the agents were trained on. So what they're optimized for. And if you have dead code, delete it, but agents are going to know like how to traverse that and what to get out of it. But yeah, you're right. They start to get confused when they're taking, okay, this is the code base, but your name is tied to this document conflicting with what's in the code. And it's conflicting in this old JIRA or linear task. So like, I'm just going to flip a coin because I'm meant to please you. And your name is on the code and your name is on the task. Your name's on the doc. So I'm just going to make a call here. And it's so great because I'm like a magnet for friends at companies where they're like, I just heard the other day, somebody was like, we had the worst incident I've ever experienced in my career. It was weeks of cleanup because an agent made the wrong call based on a document. Like it is, this happened to me at Uber, except it was humans not updating the documents. Like agents are going to do the same thing, but worse because they're going to write…

I think before we get to the cool shit, like decision records are incredible. And I love, and I'm telling everybody, just write stuff down with a timestamp. You don't need to perfect it or make it like beautiful. You can do that later. If you write it down and keep it in chronological order, you can do stuff with that later. I'm not even, I think internally people just have to clean up their junk. They don't realize that 95 probably, and this has proved out true from doing this exercise at Uber and Stripe and then a bunch of clients when I was advising, probably like one to two percent of the stuff you have is actually useful. 98, 95%, let's be generous, is copies of docs, outdated docs for deprecated features. It's stubs, like just scratch pads. And all of these are Google Docs, they're Notion docs. Like whether people still read them, they're in the context for the agents and they're in your search. So when you go search and they're bloating it, and then a lot of these search tools provide weight for age. So the older it is, the more, I remember we were working with this customer that had like 8,000 employees. And the first thing Internal Docs when I search, they were using Notion to…