About
Most manuals are written once and read never.
Living Manual started from a small, annoying observation: almost every organization has an authoritative document that nobody actually reads.
It is the operations manual, the employee handbook, the policy book. Someone spent weeks writing it. It is careful, complete, and correct. Then it becomes a PDF in a shared drive, and the questions it was written to answer get asked out loud anyway, over and over, because opening a hundred-page document to find one paragraph is more work than pinging a coworker.
The document is not the problem. The way we make people use it is.
The idea
What if the document could answer for itself? You upload the PDF, and Living Manual turns it into three things at once: clean browsable pages, real full-text search, and an AI docent your team can ask in plain language. One upload, no reformatting, no second system to keep in sync.
The manual stops being a file you open and becomes something you can talk to.
The part that makes it trustworthy
An assistant that makes up a plausible-sounding policy is worse than no assistant at all. So the docent has one rule it will not break: it answers only from your document, and it cites the exact section every time. If your manual does not cover something, the docent says so instead of inventing an answer. That is what makes it safe for the content where being wrong actually costs something: operations, compliance, safety, HR.
What we believe
It lives on your stack.
Living Manual runs inside your own WordPress, behind your own logins, on your own Anthropic key. Your manual and your visitors' questions never pass through us. There is no cloud to trust with your content.
The AI runs at cost.
Because it uses your own API key, you pay Anthropic directly for what you use, usually pennies per question. No per-seat subscription, no tokens resold at a markup.
It never bluffs.
Every answer is grounded in your document and carries its sources. When the manual is silent, so is the docent. Trust is the whole product.
The core is free forever.
Browsable pages and real search are free on WordPress.org and genuinely useful on their own. The AI docent and the insights loop are the paid upgrade, when you are ready for them.
Who builds it
Living Manual is built and maintained by William Alexander, an independent developer who builds tools for WordPress. It is a small, focused product with a direct line to the person who makes it. If you have a question, a problem, or an idea, you can reach me at william@williamalexander.co.
See it for yourself.
Watch the docent answer from a real manual, or install the free core and turn it on when you are ready.