Ask HN: Tool that interviews engineers to capture project knowledge

4 points by helltone 273 days ago | 2 comments

Docs are always the first thing to rot. When engineers leave or switch projects, a ton of context disappears: why decisions were made, what the gotchas are, how to onboard the next person.

I’m exploring a tool that interviews engineers, architects, machinists and other technical staff about their projects instead of asking them to write docs. It would ask structured questions (What tradeoffs did you make? What would you warn the next person about?) and turn the answers into a lightweight, searchable knowledge base. Would this actually solve a pain point for your team, or just become one more thing nobody uses?

Curious to hear if this resonates.

mustaphah 272 days ago |

Well, that's interesting.

I doubt it's feasible without human curation (of the content produced) in the loop - at least not with the current state of AI. Also, writing docs should be a team practice. A tool like this could actually cause more harm than good if engineers lean on it too heavily. I mean, interviews capture a moment in time; without regular updates, context will drift.

More importantly, this leans hard on human memory, and most people have terrible ones. That can be partially fixed by prompting to explain why they made specific tradeoffs proactively. For example, the LLM could detect that a tradeoff was made and then ask: why this one? And potentially list the alternatives.

It's a cool idea. You can build a proof-of-concept in a few days with AI prototyping tools.

brudgers 270 days ago |

Asking for money is a good way to measure interest in an idea.

Asking for opinions is a good way to get arbitrary noise and avoid rejection.

In terms of the specifics, interviewing engineers in person is the only way to understand what you should build. You are building an "expert system" and expert systems require expertise.

The typical pain points are time and effort and interface. And the value proposition differs among users and organizations. And at best it is going to be what you imagine it is for a tiny number of organizations; the best likely case is that your imagination matches one organization (but that's you); and the most likely case is your imagination matches no reality.

Hard work might get you something. Good luck.