Turning a 232-Page Manual Into Something an AI Could Use

Late last year, I spent a couple of days getting a manual into a shape an AI could use. The language it described wasn’t new, and I wasn’t changing it. It was for a legacy scripting language that had been running workflow and event logic for over a decade. It was also thoroughly documented: a 232-page technical guide, cataloguing a couple of hundred built-in functions, each with its parameters and an example. For once, the problem wasn’t that nobody had written the rules down. The problem was that the 232 pages had been written for humans, and the thing that needed to read them this time was an AI.