"The people who know the most write the least. The docs that get written are stale within weeks. And the knowledge that matters most - the decisions, the gotchas, the 'why' behind the code - rarely makes it into a document because it's not the kind of thing you sit down and write."
"I've watched this cycle play out on every team I've been part of: Week 1: 'We need to document this.' Everyone agrees. Week 4: A few pages exist. They're pretty good. Week 12: The pages are getting stale. Week 24: Engineers actively avoid the docs because they've been burned by outdated information."
"Here's what nobody wants to admit: the most valuable knowledge is generated during work, not after it. When an engineer decides to use cursor-based pagination instead of offset-based - that's a decision being made, with context and rationale, right now, in the middle of implementation."
Documentation is crucial but asking teams to document after completing tasks has consistently failed. The most knowledgeable individuals often write the least, leading to stale documents. Valuable knowledge is generated during work, not afterward. A cycle of initial enthusiasm for documentation quickly deteriorates as updates are neglected, resulting in engineers distrusting outdated information. The cycle repeats with suggestions for documentation sprints, but the core issue remains unaddressed: the need for real-time documentation during the decision-making process.
Read at DevOps.com
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