The Myth of the Post-Documentation Era

Short summary

An opinion piece arguing that documentation remains essential even in an era of AI-agent-driven development. Code and specs explain how a system works but cannot capture why architectural decisions were made. Fully automated LLM-generated docs risk creating hallucinated noise, so human oversight is non-negotiable. The author identifies the lack of a trustworthiness reputation system for AI-era knowledge bases as the next major developer-tooling challenge.

• •Code and specs explain 'how' but not 'why' — prose documentation still carries architectural intent
• •Unchecked LLM-generated docs create a feedback loop of hallucinated context; human oversight is essential
• •The next big shift in dev tooling will be solving the reputation and trust problem for AI-era knowledge bases

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.