Answers
We tried a shared doc of client rules and nobody updated it
The shared document did not fail for lack of discipline; it failed because keeping it current and reading it were both extra gestures, and an extra gesture loses to billable work every time. Curated memory removes both. The assistants already inside the work write what was decided at the moment it is decided, and the norm is read when an assistant opens the work rather than when somebody remembers to look it up. What is left for a person is a short review — approve or correct what was written — which is a few minutes over work already done, not a chore waiting to be done.
Last updated September 2, 2026
The doc failed at reading before it failed at maintenance
Every post-mortem of a shared rules document blames upkeep, but the earlier failure is the read. A document only helps whoever thinks to open it, and the moment help is needed is the moment nobody has attention to spare — mid-draft, on a call, answering a client. So it goes stale invisibly: nobody reads it, so nobody notices it is wrong, so there is no pressure to fix it, so it gets read even less.
Writing happens inside the work, not after it
A decision becomes a memory at the moment it is made, written in a line or two by the assistant that was there when it happened. There is no separate act of documentation to schedule and no weekly slot to defend. This is the part that changes the economics: the cost of recording a decision drops to almost nothing, and things end up on the record that nobody would ever have opened a document for.
Every entry carries the condition that ends it
The other half of the decay is that a document has no way of saying which of its lines has expired. Each memory is stored with what kills it or forces a review — an explicit revocation, a named trigger, a date — so a superseded rule stops being served instead of quietly competing with the current one. Staleness becomes visible and removable, rather than something a reader has to guess at.
What it looks like in practice
A firm keeps a page per client with the rules for that account: what never goes in writing, who actually signs off, the pricing exception agreed in year one. It stays accurate for about four months. A year later two of the fifteen pages are current, nobody knows which two, and the page has stopped being consulted — not because anyone decided to abandon it, but because a source you cannot trust costs more to check than to ignore.
Questions people ask about this
- How is this not just another place to keep the same rules?
- By where it gets read. A wiki is a destination someone has to visit; this is served into the work of whichever AI each person already uses, at the start, without anyone remembering. If the reading depended on a person going somewhere, it would decay exactly as the document did — that failure mode is what the design is avoiding, not a detail of it.
- Do we have to migrate the document we already have?
- No, and putting it in wholesale would be the wrong move. What is worth bringing over is what is still true and still decided, entry by entry, with a person approving each one — and that pass is also the first honest inventory of how much of the document had already expired. Anything that is only a description of how things work does not need to become a norm at all.
- What stops the collection from rotting the same way?
- Two things, and neither is a habit someone has to keep up. Entries carry their own expiry condition, so a rule that no longer applies leaves instead of sitting there looking current; and writing is cheap enough that the record keeps up with the work instead of falling behind it, which is the part a document never managed. What a person does is a short veto over what was written, after the fact — keeping the collection healthy is treated as the product's responsibility, not as standing homework for whoever owns the account.
Where this is verifiable
Product documentation on this site (How it works, Install) and the sanctioned product spec in the repository, for how a memory is written, sanctioned and retired. Everything described here is behaviour the tools apply today, not roadmap.
https://www.arroway.app/en/answers/retiring-the-shared-doc-nobody-updates