I’m glad to have a prospective hire coming on board. Because that’s what sparked this entire effort to encode all that I’ve learned in the renovation industry into something like a second-brain repository.
Documentation nobody could digest
Without AI, I would have struggled to do this documentation at all. To write it all out. And even worse, to expect somebody to be able to digest everything.
That’s the part people miss about knowledge bases. The writing is hard, but the reading is harder. No new teammate can absorb years of lessons front to back, and no binder of processes survives contact with a real project.
AI as the intermediary
Having AI as a layer makes all of this so much more worthwhile.
There’s now an intermediary mechanism that can pull out the most relevant bits and provide just-in-time information. It summarizes, synthesizes, and contextualizes against the situation this new person is actually in, whenever a question is asked. The right answer, at the right time.
I don’t know how much further my efforts to encode my knowledge will be able to take my company. Or whether it will even be useful.
The advantage of what isn’t on the internet
But part of me believes in this, because a lot of this knowledge is tacit. It’s not found on the internet. It’s highly contextualized, the kind of thing renovation companies hold in their heads after years of experience.
And that gives me an advantage to develop something bigger: a designer school. One where we train not only interior design skills, but project management, working with contractors, and project economics. It would set individuals up for success a lot more than learning the way I had to.
The knowledge base started as onboarding for one hire. It might end up as the curriculum.