STOP IT. STOP IT NOW.
For The Uninitiated...
For those of you uninitiated, KT sessions are these long (sometimes 3+ hours) and painful live and recorded sessions where a certain person with a certain level of knowledge on a project goes through the entire project trying to explain things.
KT Sessions in Practice
In practice they're essentially useless. Nobody is actually paying attention. Nobody will go back and watch them in the future (unless forced to do so). Nobody wants to talk for that long. Given the fact that the person giving the KT session also didn't prepare for it, there's usually also a large amount of rambling and circular explanations. They're essentially useless.
However, with AI now, they are slightly less useless. Instead of listening for the 4+ hours to find the minute detail you're looking for, you can just search the AI-generated notes. However, this only solves that specific problem. Even if you find what you're looking for in the notes, you still probably don't know which files are being referenced or, even if you do know which files are being referenced, the files have almost definitely changed since the recording. Again, KT sessions suck.
The Solution (is there one?)
In my several years of software development, I haven't really found a good alternative. There are tools like Readme files, but nobody really wants to mess with those. They're just not pretty and not fun.
After thinking about this for quite some time, I built a new open source tool in the hopes of at least limiting the frequency and duration of these KT sessions. It's called "doclific" and is available as an NPM package. It's essentially a notion-like rich text editor where the docs live in your repo. You can easily reference snippets of code and the snippets update automatically if you make changes to the code.
My Blunder
After building what I thought was an awesome tool, I realized limiting or even getting rid of KT sessions is like trying to get the sun not to rise. It's impossible. They're simply a right of passage. Yes, they are horrible, but what better way to understand the new company you're starting for than to listen to the most boring person ever speak in a monotone voice for four hours talking about a codebase you don't even have access to. Here in lies the true genius of the profession we all love.
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