Doctective
Stop Updating Documentation. We Do It Accurately For You.
145 followers
Stop Updating Documentation. We Do It Accurately For You.
145 followers
Install once, document forever. Auto-updates all your documentation from your code so they never go stale.
Doctective
@johnnymedhanie This solves a painfully real problem. Broken docs waste hours, and now they even poison AI-generated code. Watching PRs and auto-updating docs feels obvious in hindsight — surprised no one shipped this earlier. Nice work.
Doctective
@nick36_wu Thank you for the kind words! Let me know if you get a chance to try it!
Auto-fixing docs on every PR is a huge unlock, but at scale the pain is false positives: refactors, renames, and “behavior changes” that AST diffs catch, but the human intent in the docs is nuanced.
Best practice is to ground updates in code-symbol provenance (tree-sitter/LSIF), generate minimal diffs, and run a CI gate that links each doc change to the exact commit and API surface change with an easy approve workflow.
How are you detecting drift today (AST/symbol graph vs heuristic grep), and can Doctective produce deterministic, reviewable PRs that pin the doc update to a specific commit hash and changelog entry?
Doctective
@ryan_thill I totally agree with you, especially if you don't want to have slop as documentation its best to ground doc changes to commits. For doctective we take a multi step approach to determine the type of change, the nuance of the doc and style and ensuring guardrails so we keep docs helpful!
Sounds super useful. What kind of documentation platforms do you support? Do you need to have the documentation in Markdown files in the same repository?
Doctective
@wilco_kruijer1 Yes, we currently manage markdown files in your Github Repos! we look across all your code and the changes you push and create PRs that automatically fix your docs
This is great! Have you also considered the idea of creating a vscode plugin that will update docs alongside the PRs on commit? Like how huskey has precommit checks, this could essentially verify docs are up to date when pushing the code?
Doctective
@imamkevin Thanks Kevin! I'm glad you mentioned this, just finished working on doing the checks and pushing the changes as commits to the PR. The idea of vscode plugin is really interesting and something I'll definitely look to integrate with!
Product Hunt
Doctective
@curiouskitty Totally fair question, we classify the code changes deterministically using AST, generate a minimal patch, confidence gates + human review via companion PRs + validation checks => you review the docs patches before merging, and low-confidence changes never make it that far
How do the automatically generated documents fare in terms of readability and practicality? Can it generate truly useful content for developers (even new team members) based on code comments and structure, rather than just a list of functions? Additionally, to what extent can I customize the document style and content focus to align with team specifications?
There’s nothing worse than following outdated documentation and getting errors, so the 'never go stale' part is huge. I wonder if it supports all the major languages right out of the box, or if you have to spend a lot of time configuring it for each project.