Your documentation quality is your AI quality now

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web →Twelve years ago, I built a little Heroku app to convert Microsoft Word documents to Markdown, because government employees kept asking me for one. It now lives at word2md.com, and these days it’s busier than it has ever been. I’d bet most of the people using it aren’t developers. They’re people with a folder full of .docx files who’ve noticed their chatbot gives better answers when they paste in plain text. They’ve figured out something I wrote about in Open and Async: Point your AI tools at your team’s docs (via MCP servers, repository indexing, or custom instructions) and watch the difference. Teams with well-structured, up-to-date documentation get noticeably better AI-assisted answers because the model can find relevant context. Teams with scattered tribal knowledge get generic responses. Your documentation quality is your AI quality now. If your institutional knowledge lives in a share drive full of Final_v3_REVISED_bb.docx,…