Automation and Experience

Automation applies an explicit model through an execution mechanism. Experience Capitalization addresses where that model comes from and how it becomes reusable.

Automation Embodies a Model

A nontrivial workflow, program, rule engine, or automated decision system embodies assumptions about entities, states, inputs, conditions, allowed actions, and results.

Even when nobody calls it a model, nontrivial automation embodies some model of the states, conditions, actions, and results it handles.

The Traditional Bottleneck

Historically, specialists and software teams reconstructed the model manually. They read documents, compared standards and specifications, examined systems, wrote requirements, and encoded their interpretation into software. The resulting operational model therefore depended heavily on repeated human reconstruction from dispersed source material.

The expensive part was often not writing the final code. It was reconstructing a sufficiently accurate model of the process.

A New Production Path

In many domains, the accumulated written corpus already contains descriptions, fragments, constraints, and evidence relevant to the models. LLMs can help reconstruct candidate structure from those materials at a scale that was previously impractical. Their broader learned statistical structure can accelerate discovery, while targeted documentary sources remain the basis for traceable verification and any binding constraints.

Experience Capitalization turns this into a systematic pipeline:

accumulated experience + documentary and formal sources, constraints, and evidence
→ candidate model reconstruction
→ verification and readiness
→ released reusable model
→ automation and other applications

Why Reuse Matters

When automation is built directly from one project's interpretation, the same domain understanding is often rebuilt again for the next project. A reusable model changes that economics.

The model can become a shared foundation for many implementations, while automation becomes one of several ways to apply it.