Documentation Culture — Making Docs Part of the Job

Why it matters

Documentation debt compounds. Building culture prevents it from becoming crushing.

The architecture

Docs-as-code: docs in Git alongside code. Same review + versioning process.

Ship together: PRs that need docs also update docs. Reviewers block on missing docs.

How it works end to end

Ownership: author of the code writes the docs. Tech writers polish, not create.

Templates: consistent structure lowers writing bar. New feature template, ADR template, runbook template.

Deprecation: prune stale docs as aggressively as add. Old docs mislead worse than missing docs.

Measurement: track doc coverage, staleness, usefulness (feedback).