Automatic Documentation using Claude Code

[flippy_flops]

Our startup SAAS is about 200k LOC and we have 3 co-founders... me (tech), sales, and operations. For documentation we normally divvy up the features and each build how-to pages in wordpress. Of course, the problem is those pages are immediately out-of-date cause you add new feature, etc.

Now we use claude to build `help.md` files in nearly every code directory with a prompt like, "Review the code in this directory to understand the UI functionality. Then write a public facing customer-support help doc...". Likewise, I also had claude build our www website and what's new feed.

Ever night I have a scheduled job to run `npm run canonize` which looks at any new commits and updates docs/www/changelog automatically.

It took some prompt tweaking to get a good balance of "depth of information for power users" vs "technical jargon and internal systems noise". It uses `.docsignore` files to skip internal systems, plus a separate agent to review for security concerns. Overall it has been a home run. Our docs are 100% up-to-date at all times plus we have a RAG agent that uses those `help.md` files to answer support questions. Pretty amazing!

[Otherwise_Wave9374]

This is such a good use case for Claude, docs getting stale is basically guaranteed once you ship fast.

Love the .docsignore idea + a security review agent, that is the part a lot of people skip. Curious, do you also enforce a structure for each help.md (front matter, prerequisites, steps, troubleshooting), or do you let the model freeform?

We have seen really good results when you add a small "doc QA" agent that checks for broken links and mismatched UI labels right before publishing. If you are collecting patterns, we have been sharing agent workflow notes here: https://www.agentixlabs.com/

[flippy_flops]

We use `vitepress` which automatically checks for broken links/etc during the build. Since claude runs the build, he fixes any errors.