Higher Ground

Everyone in this industry already understands the problem. Retirements are carrying away decades of experience. Tribal knowledge is walking out the door with the people who carried it. SOPs often describe what the books say should happen, not what the equipment actually does in real life. The problem is widely recognized, and nothing has really been built to solve it at scale.

When I published The Flood, some of the strongest responses came from industry veterans. Harry Wilkins has 28 years in this field, and he put the pattern plainly: a lot of the guys retiring have the mindset of "I had to learn on my own, so why should I just give it away." And when he says this is one of the biggest issues, he's correct. The mindset is a rational answer to the deal on offer.

The knowledge belongs in the programs and the SOPs. Those documents should reflect reality. But when a technician or operator hands over what they've learned over twenty or thirty years, the deal has always been the same. The information goes into the facility's program. Their name comes off in the first revision. What they spent years figuring out becomes company property owned by people who never learned it firsthand. The contributor gets nothing back—no money, no public standing, no permanent record that the insight was theirs. They've just made themselves more replaceable.

There has never been anywhere for that knowledge to live that still belonged to the person who earned it. So most of it never made it onto paper at all.

Two kinds of knowledge exist in this industry. One is what the standard says. The other is what the equipment actually does.

Only the first kind has infrastructure. A consultant writes a report. It gets cited. It shapes the next report, then the standards conversation, the committee, the revision. Twenty years of that and the consultant becomes an authority—and the authority is earned. Reading a standard and knowing exactly how an auditor will interpret one sentence is a real skill most people never master.

The second kind—what the equipment actually does—has nowhere to go. Half of what this industry knows compounds and gets stronger over time. The other half simply evaporates. Authority points one direction. Consequence points the other. The engineer who wrote the report drives home at the end of the day. When the system does something nobody predicted, the technician is the one standing in front of it at 2 AM with no citation and no record that he was right.

The regulation saw this coming. Employee participation is the first requirement in the PSM standard—29 CFR 1910.119—ahead of PHAs and mechanical integrity. It has been since 1992. At most facilities it's still one signed page that says employees will participate and have access to process safety information. The auditor asks, you produce it, you pass. OSHA named the most important problem in this industry in 1992 and it became a form.

AI tools are coming into this industry whether we're ready or not. They reason over whatever text they can reach. Right now that text on ammonia refrigeration is manuals, marketing copy, and older or abstract versions of standards plus old forum posts. That's the corpus. A new technician with nobody to ask is going to ask the model instead. That's what will answer him.

The industry doesn't get to decide whether the tools exist. That decision is already made. It gets to decide what's in them.

Which means the unwritten half—the practical knowledge that never made it onto paper—is now the scarce input. Everything else was scraped years ago. The thing this industry has always treated as an afterthought has suddenly become the one thing the models don't already have. The window to get it on the record on our own terms is open right now. It won't stay open.

r717.ai was built to fix the incentive.

The record is for the whole field: the technician who knows what a compressor sounds like two weeks before it fails, the engineer who understands why a relief header was sized the way it was, the safety professional who has seen the same near-miss repeat at forty plants. The line was never between job titles. It was between what got written down and what didn't. Everyone carries some of the unwritten kind.

The name stays on the knowledge permanently. The record belongs to the person, not the employer. It travels with you across jobs and decades and builds the same kind of standing the written half has always had.

Questions get several named answers from different experienced people, never one flattened verdict. This field disagrees constantly, and the disagreement itself is information. It tells a newer technician that the right answer depends on conditions he can't see yet.

The entire record is free to read, permanently.

Derive Software funds r717.ai. Derive also sells iPSM. Separate infrastructure, separate editorial. iPSM may use a reviewed export of the public knowledge—the same export anyone can read—because it's public. iPSM does not decide what publishes. Contributing costs nothing, requires nothing, and routes to no product.

A field note under your name could be read by an employer as disclosing plant conditions. So questions are anonymous by default—the question goes on the record, not the asker. Contributed knowledge carries your name, because that's the deal. Nothing requires naming a facility. Equipment facts don't need a plant attached to be true. If an employer contacts r717.ai about a contributor, nothing unpublished is handed over and the contributor is told. That policy will be published on the site before contribution opens.

r717.ai is live today with the principles and signup. Over the coming weeks it opens the moderated texting line—a technician texts a question, a moderator reviews it first, it routes to several people who know that equipment, and several named answers come back. Active emergencies get exactly one answer: follow your EAP. You'll also see recorded interviews with operators who would never sit down and write an essay, plus direct field notes from anyone with a fact worth putting on the record.

Every retirement in this industry is still a single point of failure. The facilities that survive are the ones where the knowledge outlasts the person. That happens when putting it on the record costs the person nothing and builds them something.

It's July 17th. R717. Seems like the day to start the record.

r717.ai