Knowledge-Management

The system can keep running long after the reasoning behind it has left. You can’t test it, because the only place it runs is production, so you read the logs and you sit with someone while they do their job with it and build up a picture of what it does from the outside. The customer said it pulls from the billing platform on a schedule, but the logs say it pushes on a trigger, the connection string points at a host that isn’t on the network diagram, and the job everyone calls the nightly sync runs four times a day. At one point the worker does a step that makes no sense, and when you ask why, the answer is that’s just how it’s always done. It takes time and the picture you end up with is nothing like the description, but you get there. ...

I’d written off Claude Cowork before I’d really used it. What changed my mind was having to demo it as part of some cross-company AI training I’m running, which meant finding a reason for it to exist for people who weren’t me. When I went looking for ways to show it to non-technical colleagues, I found things it could do for them that I’d never have looked for on my own behalf. One of them had a job that meant reconciling the same information across three systems, pulling it out of a CRM, checking it against a spreadsheet, then cross-referencing email to confirm the spreadsheet was actually up to date. It took them a good chunk of time every time they did it. By the end I had a flow that did the whole thing on a single click, and none of that was something I’d have gone looking for if I weren’t trying to make the tool make sense to someone else. ...

A P1 landed mid-morning with no context, the person who’d been handling it was off without a handover, and there were already several people on the call waiting for something to happen. The customer had been sitting with the issue for a while before we got involved, and what I had to work from was basically nothing. I started from scratch, kept it simple and worked up from there, and had it resolved within half an hour. The fix was something I’d documented two years earlier: Windows blocking files downloaded from the internet, unblocked via PowerShell, and I only found it because I’d written it down. ...