Is manual documentation just dead when codebases evolve this fast?
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I feel like internal documentation has become a losing battle lately. Code changes endpoints move around, and setup configs tweak every few days but no one wants to pause momentum just to write static markdown files. Eventually onboarding becomes a game of "ask the lead dev on Slack" because the official docs are useless.
We're trying to figure out if there's a lightweight habit that actually sticks like auto generating API docs from code comments or keeping docs right inside the codebase itself.
If you work on a fast moving project what's one actual practical workflow that kept your docs from falling behind without feeling like a chore?
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What stopped mine from going stale was changing what the docs are for. They do not describe what the code does, the code already says that and goes out of date the moment it is copied into markdown. They record only what the code cannot say: why a decision was made, a vendor quirk, a trap someone already fell into. Those facts barely change, so they stay true. And the habit that sticks is writing it at the moment it is learned, inside the repo next to the code, one file per area, not as a separate documentation task later. When the docs are the project's memory instead of its manual, nobody has to pause momentum to keep them.