How I Built an Agent That Keeps My Docs From Going Stale

Short summary

An engineer shares how they solved documentation rot caused by an autonomous coding agent making rapid code changes without updating docs. The solution is a separate, narrowly-scoped doc-sync agent pass that runs after code changes and tests pass, using a reverse index to identify only docs referencing changed files. Key guardrails prevent the agent from rewriting docs that don't need changes.

• •Autonomous coding agents accelerate doc rot from weeks to days
• •A separate doc-sync pass after code changes works better than inline instructions
• •A reverse index maps docs to source files so only relevant docs are checked
• •Guardrails prevent the doc-sync agent from making unnecessary edits on every run

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