Somebody wrote all of this down
Everything the tool knows about this work, it knows because somebody wrote it down. I was one of the people doing the writing.
A forum thread with the answer at the bottom of it. A mailing list archive nobody has opened for years. A wiki that is half dead links now. A comment left in a config file, explaining the one line that made no sense. Somebody finishing a shift late, still turning a fault over, typing out the fix in case it saved the next person an evening. Then a stranger adding the part the first answer got wrong. I put my own share in over the years and thought nothing of it at the time.
It is all summarised now, into something I can ask. The answer comes back quick and it is usually good, and I use it most days, the same as most people in this trade. The strange part is being answered in the shape of my own working life, by a thing that never sat in front of a machine that would not do what it was told for an hour.
There is nothing mysterious about where it came from. People who did the work wrote the work down, mostly for nothing, mostly because that is what you do when you have spent an evening on a fault and want it to count for something past your own evening. The whole of it was built out of that habit, one fault at a time, by people who were paid for the job rather than for the writing of it.
What I notice more these days is how much of this trade never got written down at all. The parts done in a hurry. The obvious ones, obvious enough that nobody thought to mention it. The feel for a system that only comes from watching it go wrong in person, twice, at an awkward hour. That part lives in a person, and it leaves when the person does.
So the writing down carries on, and I am the one doing more of it than I used to. When I fix something, the reason goes next to it in the plainest words I have, for whoever opens the file after me. None of it will be mine, and none of it was asked for. It is the same habit that built the thing I now ask my questions of, and it costs me nothing to keep.