GoKawiil◆ leadership Apr 29, 2026 7 min read
Every engineering organization has a Sarah. Humans can ask her - agents won't.
Sarah is the person who knows why a service was split, why an abstraction exists, why a strange constraint shaped the current design, and why the obvious fix was rejected three quarters ago.
That dramatically changes the importance of documentation. Documentation is no longer a courtesy to future humans. Instead, it becomes our primary way of ensuring durable, available, historical context. The same way boring code is an organizational tell, the absence of documentation reveals priorities, and agents will amplify them faster than ever.
Imagine an agent opening a new task. It starts going through the codebase to find patterns to help it decide what to do. It looks through the documentation for an ADR explaining why the service is structured the way it is. But there is none, and no spec describing the intent.
The agent will do what it’s built to do: find the dominant pattern and extend it. That’s not agents being buggy or overly optimistic, but the lack of persisted context propagating.
A decision was made - the code is there after all. It just wasn’t written down. So, the agent inherits the output without the reasoning, and fills in the blanks the best it can.
Humans carry state
Organizational memory has always been a social structure just as much as a technical one. It’s been living with the engineer who has been on the team for seven years. It’s ingrained in the phrase “just ask Sarah”, or in the context handed off in one-on-ones and accumulated across stand-ups. Writing turned into a backup. It was always supposed to be there, but rarely maintained to the point where it could actually stand in for the human who held the original context.
This was survivable as long as the cost was deferred, not permanent. The engineer who made the decision last quarter is hopefully still on the team, allowing you to reconstruct the intent by just walking over to their desk and asking. The penalty of the bus factor only ever incurred through staffing changes. And as changes occured, we’d do handovers which, while incomplete, served as plaster over the cracks.
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