Running a company on agents · 3 min read

We write our docs for the agents now

We’ve switched to writing our documentation primarily for our agents.

The short version, on video.

The neat Drive nobody trusted

Our docs started out nice and organised: folders for SOPs, screencasts, templates etc. But as the company grew, things spread around, became outdated and duplicated, and versions started to conflict. We slipped out of the good routines and gradually we stopped trusting our documentation; nobody really knew what the source of truth was.

For example, we had six drifting copies of our price sheet, and the wrong prices made it into a media kit. Nobody did anything careless. There were just six places a price could live, and they disagreed.

This would waste a lot of time waiting for someone on the team (often me, as CEO) to make the call as to what the correct answer was.

One repo, written for agents

Now everything lives in one git repository: policies, SOPs, the editorial style guide, sales prices and terms. Git gives us one place, a history of every change, and plain text files that our AI agents can read and edit as easily as we can.

That last part changed who the docs are for. Most of the time the reader is an agent: the one setting up a campaign, answering a pricing question or drafting a client email. So the docs are written to be unambiguous to a machine.

It still mirrors onto Google Drive as read-only copies, “so we can open files and look at them if we need to.” Anything typed into the mirror gets overwritten, which is the point.

Six drifting copies became one repo. Drive is now a window onto it, not a second copy.

The listening routine

This is the part worth stealing. A lot of company policy is decided out loud, in a meeting or a Slack thread, and never written down. So a routine regularly reads our meeting transcripts and Slack for exactly that, and proposes the change to the docs.

The trust question

We barely read our own docs now. That takes some trust that the agents aren’t going rogue. But it beats a Drive full of contradictions.

This is where git comes in handy: changes are all tracked and versioned. If an agent writes something odd, you can see who, when and why, and roll it back.

How to start

Don’t move everything. Move one set of docs first: the one that causes the most wrong answers. For us that was prices.

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