DOP 342: Your Company Documentation Is Useless for AI

DOP 342: Your Company Documentation Is Useless for AI

From DevOps Paradox by Darin Pope & Viktor Farcic

March 18, 2026 · 55 min · Episode 342

About this episode

The episode discusses the inadequacies of company documentation for AI initiatives and proposes a need for a continuous process to manage information sources effectively.

#342: Most companies have plenty of documentation. The problem is almost none of it is findable, current, or true. Between what's documented, what's actually true, and what people actually do, there are gaps wide enough to kill any AI initiative before it starts. Viktor makes a distinction that reframes the whole problem: there are two types of documentation. Why something was done -- that's eternal. How something works -- that's outdated the moment someone changes a config and forgets to update the wiki. The information about that change probably exists somewhere -- in a Zoom recording, a Slack thread, somebody's head -- but it's not where anyone would think to look for it. The running system itself is the most accurate documentation any company has. Your Kubernetes cluster tells you how many pods are running right now. Git tells you how many you wished you had. Those aren't the same thing, and pretending Git is the source of truth is a comfortable lie most teams tell themselves daily. RAG won't save this. Not the way most people imagine it -- point an agent at your docs and let it answer questions. That fails for the same reason Google's old enterprise search appliance failed…

People in this episode

Host: Viktor

Topics covered

  • documentation
  • AI
  • DevOps
  • Kubernetes
  • information management

Keywords

  • findability
  • current documentation
  • truth in documentation
  • information gaps
  • continuous process

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Zoom, Kubernetes, Git

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