Every company has at least one rule that nobody can explain anymore. My answer to that has always been to write more of what we know into the codebase. To anyone who is not an engineer, that sounds like more technical work for a problem that does not feel technical.

That is a fair thing to hear. The problem is the word "codebase."

Every company depends on knowledge that nobody wrote down. A new person asks why nobody touches that old system, or why this one client is handled differently from all the others. Someone answers from memory. Everyone nods. That is where the answer lives.

Then it disappears. People leave. People forget. The rule stays, but the reason is gone. That is how companies end up with rules nobody can explain and nobody wants to change.

For a long time this was hidden, because people covered the gap. Someone always remembered enough, for long enough. A machine cannot do that. It reads what you wrote and nothing more. Give it a rule without the reason, and it will follow that rule in the one situation where a person would have known to stop.

Programmers solved the remembering problem for themselves long ago. Every change has an author. Every change has a reason. Someone else reviews it. The history is kept forever.

We called that engineering. It was never only about code.

In our company we started with the meetings, because that is the room where the reasons are still said out loud. The calls are recorded in Zoom and Fireflies anyway. Now an agent reads the transcript and pulls out what was decided, what was rejected, and why. That becomes a short standing rule, written down where anyone can find it later.

You do not need any of this to begin. Take one decision your team made last year and write a page. Not what you chose — everyone remembers that. Write what you rejected, and why. The hard part is not the writing. It is how much is already gone.