Where Should Documentation Actually Live? Thinking Out Loud in the AI Era
TL;DR Documentation sprawl across Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, Google Docs, GitHub, and Miro is not a tool problem - it is a joints problem: the same decision exists in four places, drifting out of sync immediately Three forces constantly pull against each other: source of truth (one canonical home), discoverability (right surface for every audience), and governance (real access control) - optimising for any one breaks the others The proposed shape: docs-as-code for engineering artefacts in Git, collaborative tools for business content, a read-only render layer between them, and an AI-assisted discovery layer across all of it AI tooling weakens the old boundary - a business user can get a summary generated from a markdown master without ever seeing the file, and an engineer can draft an ADR pulling context from Confluence and Jira automatically Several genuine open questions remain unsolved: versioning across boundaries, who owns the render pipeline, and whether Jira tickets as documents should be formalised or fought against This post is me thinking out loud. It is not a proposal, not a recommended pattern, and possibly not even a useful framing. I am writing it because I am actively stuck on the question, and writing in public tends to be the fastest way I find out what I have got wrong. Feel free to disagree with any of it. ...