What's the minimum viable documentation discipline?

A decision log. Five lines per decision: what, why, when, who decided, what we'll revisit. The bar is low enough that it gets done.

Why does the wiki always die?

Because nobody is graded on it. Slack writing is rewarded with reactions in real time. Wiki writing is rewarded by an absent reader, six months later, who never tells you they found it useful.

Stop telling new hires to scroll back

Maya joined the team on a Monday. By Friday, four separate people had told her to scroll back in #eng-general for context. She scrolled. The channel held 17 partial discussions of the one architecture decision she needed, none resolved, two contradicting each other, one closed with a thumbs-up emoji that was apparently how the team recorded consensus.

That was the documentation. There was also a Notion workspace: 62 pages, 41 untouched in over a year, a dozen with titles starting in [OLD].

Slack becomes the knowledge base in every company without a real one, and most companies don't have one. Slack is easy to write in. It pays you back in reactions, in real time. It is also the worst filing system ever shipped, because every decision scrolls into the dark at the speed of the next message, search runs on keywords against throwaway phrasing, and the only index is a timestamp.

Maya pays this cost loudest, but everyone already there pays it on a quieter schedule. A call made in a thread in 2023 gets re-argued in a thread in 2024, same tradeoffs, same people, because nobody could find the first thread. Then again the year after. The waste compounds and stays invisible, since no single instance feels like waste.

A better wiki won't save you. Good wikis rot at the same rate as bad ones, because the failure is incentive, not tooling. What survives is a decision log. Five lines an entry. What we decided. Why. When. Who owns it. What would make us revisit. The decider writes it, not a documentation team. Entries get appended, never edited, the way a good runbook beats the knowledge locked in one person's head.

The log holds because the bar is low. Five lines is ninety seconds, cheap enough that the decider does it before the energy fades. Six months on, any reader reconstructs the context in three minutes. It is the one documentation artifact I've watched survive, because its cost to write stays below the friction of writing. Contrast the quarterly OKR nobody remembered: heavy to produce, easy to ignore, gone by mid-quarter.

Slack stays where discussion happens. That's fine; Slack is good at discussion. The decision the discussion produced has to live somewhere that does not scroll. The five-line entry is the cheapest version of somewhere.

Skip it, and your wiki is your Slack history, your Slack history is unfindable, and every new hire spends their first month redoing the exact archaeology the last one did. Maya will do it. So will the person after Maya.