AI Is Forcing Docs to Grow Up
6 days ago
- #AI
- #documentation
- #developer-tools
- Documentation is now being treated as a product, not just an afterthought.
- Generative AI has exposed the brittleness of most documentation, making it useless for LLMs.
- Modern documentation must cater to people, search engines, and AI models, requiring higher quality and consistency.
- AI assistants parse documentation differently, relying on structure, clarity, and semantic meaning for accurate results.
- Good documentation helps AI perform better, while poor documentation leads to hallucinations or failures.
- Companies are optimizing docs for vector databases, RAG pipelines, and automated summarizers.
- Great modern documentation needs clear structure, semantic chunks, realistic examples, and direct language.
- Examples of excellent documentation include Stripe API Docs, MDN Web Docs, HashiCorp Terraform Docs, Kubernetes Documentation, and Supabase Docs.
- AI raises expectations, forcing documentation to be clean, complete, structured, and semantically coherent.
- Embracing high-quality documentation leads to better support, fewer user frustrations, and higher product adoption.