Stale docs are worse than no docs
The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.
I've almost never fully trusted a document.
Not because documentation didn't exist — there was plenty. Wikis in Notion, specs in Confluence, planning docs in Google Drive. The volume was fine. The problem was that a few months later, one or two out of ten would quietly drift from the truth. That's the trap — nine out of ten are still accurate, so you assume the last one is too. If it's the meeting room policy, you laugh it off. If it's the fee structure, it's not funny. (Imagine a missing zero.)
The one thing I could always trust as a developer was the code. Code can't lie — if it's wrong, it just breaks. Documents stay plausible long after they've gone stale. Developers were valued because they worked closest to the truth — or so they were, once.
There are two kinds of documents. One reflects the present — a Single Source of Truth (SSOT), the one place you can point to and say "this is current." The other is a snapshot: accurate when written, but no guarantees after that.
Think about leave tracking. If your remaining PTO lives in the HR system, that's the SSOT. But if your manager also tracks it in a spreadsheet, the moment those two disagree, nobody trusts either.
Most planning docs, design specs, and meeting notes are snapshots, not SSOTs. They were correct on the day they were written. A week later? Who knows. And a stale document is more dangerous than a missing one — when there's nothing, people go check. When there's a document, they just trust it.
In the age of AI, these snapshots are exploding. A few AI sessions and you've got a polished proposal, a research report, an execution plan. Next session, it all gets thrown out. The cost of producing documentation is approaching zero, so snapshots pile up — but nobody's cleaning them up.
Eventually someone will ask AI to "organize all this." That'll just produce another snapshot.
The problem isn't having too many documents. The problem is never asking which ones need to stay alive. SSOTs are fewer than you think. The rest? Just acknowledge them as snapshots.