Ask HN: How do you keep documentation up to date with AI generated code?
Comments
trio8453
RetroTechie
If you want do it right:
1. Update the documentation first, to describe the desired / expected behaviour.
2. Followed by the code changes that implement the documented behaviour.
PRs: for any behaviour change, feature addition etc: patch must include corresponding documentation updates. If not: reject.
Iirc that was (still is?) OpenBSD's approach to keeping docs up-to-date.
ReptileMan
From my observations - by accumulating technical debt faster than US and EU financial combined.
If someone asks about the internals of the projects it is - you want the truth, you can't handle the truth.
jsabess24
I pr and do regression test
rstagi
Honestly same way I did before, checking periodically. There's a real challenge though: I'm getting less and less knowledgeable about the details of my own code, so it's hard to fact-check everything all the time.
Anyway, for now we're assisting to either outdated Docs (Coding Agents often don't even look at them), or to over-bloated ones (the slop is not just in the code). We should probably still find a balance between human readable docs (e.g. README.md) and LLM-tailored ones (e.g. llms.txt)
moomoo11
have an ai workflow man it’s mid 2026.
any time ai does any work, it ensures the ADRs are up to date.
it is part of the execution workflow.
maintain the todos which are a record of work that was done. ADRs have the latest current documentation.
The documentation lives alongside the code and is changed at the same time.