Your replacement would like a copy of the company handbook.

The We Are So Done take

We have spent years explaining that the valuable part of our company is not the software. It is the experience. The judgement. The thousand little things you learn only by doing the work. Excellent news: someone would like to purchase a copy.

The appeal is embarrassingly easy to understand. That documentation cost money to produce and mostly sits there waiting for a new employee to ignore it. If it can fund the next product, keep a team working or buy us another year to try something ambitious, of course we want to hear the offer. We are entrepreneurial people. We have invoices.

Then comes the unusually tidy part of the transaction. We explain what happens when the normal process fails, how we recognise a useful exception and why the obvious answer is sometimes wrong. The things we used to cite as evidence that a person was indispensable start looking like the most valuable pages in the handover.

For those of us with our own software and years of customer knowledge, this is both wonderful and slightly nauseating. We can use better AI to do far more with what we have built. We can also help better AI understand why anyone needed what we built in the first place. Both opportunities arrive wearing the same very reasonable business case.

A licence does not magically reproduce a company. Customers, trust, execution and responsibility still matter. We would simply prefer that our competitive advantage remained a little harder to attach to an email.

We were worried AI would learn our jobs. Then someone offered to pay us for the instructions. Please send the agreement. We have a few comments, and an assistant that can help us write them.