Docs Are Dead, Long Live Decisions

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Code is cheap now, and so is documentation. And still I often face outdated, useless technical documentation in nearly every project I encounter. Either it is solely AI-written and therefore more or less just a description of the status quo. Or it is handwritten / AI-supported and therefore outdated (and most likely still just a description of the status quo).

But there’s no point in documenting the status quo anymore. When I want to understand a project’s architecture, coding standards, or whatever, I don’t open the docs anymore. I open my coding harness, point it at the code and get a more precise answer than any documentation could give. A good harness also knows me after working with it for a while: how senior I am and how I think about software. So it explains things at my level, far better than a static page maintained by whoever drew the short straw this quarter. Sure, juniors may need a few starter questions, but an onboarding skill covers that easily.

AI on Sailer.Software

Docs Are Dead, Long Live Decisions