Write the messy notes yourself, then let the AI build the runbook

sweetmelon team · Operations

You're the only one who knows how the upgrade actually goes. Writing it down has been on your list since spring, and asking an AI to produce the document gets you something that reads well and describes a company that isn't yours. Get it out of your head first. Spend an afternoon typing the steps in whatever order they come, badly punctuated, half of them fragments. What matters is that it's the real sequence, including the parts that only you know: the step where the service takes three minutes to come back and people assume it has failed, the config file that has to be edited before the restart rather than after, the one box that still runs the old version. Then hand the notes over and talk about the table of contents before anything gets written. How a runbook is divided decides whether anyone finds the thing they need at eleven at night. Once the outline holds up, take it chapter by chapter: it drafts, you read that chapter and list what's wrong, it revises. Then give it to someone who has never done the job and watch them work through it without asking you anything. Every question they have to ask is a gap in the document, and that's the only real test it gets. The manual ends up carrying the parts nobody could have invented, because you wrote those down before the AI touched any of it.