The documentation is rotting

Being from the last generation of engineers who built their fundamentals from documentation and books (pre-GPT, i.e. before 2022), I think we will always have an upper edge over the post-GPT engineers, because even if the entire codebase is agent-written, if required or at a time of urgency, we can still look at the code for the first time and make the required changes without any agent. We read the fundamentals in their pure form, not the poorly summarized version of the same docs.

There’s no harm in doing that if you’re in this for the money or career, but it is an absolute disgrace to never look at the documentation if you’re in this for the love of the game. It’s also a shitty corporate problem when deadlines are squeezed unrealistically and each documentation provides a “Copy context for agents” button.

Which is why a lot of open source documentation has started to feel outdated. It’s not that the maintainers don’t care anymore, it’s just that it’s harder than ever to keep up with updates and upgrades. You can push changes to a library using agents, day in and day out, but nobody cares much about updating the documentation meticulously, or worse, updating the documentation of some other library or dependency for something as big as a breaking version update.

For example, it’s been months now since Prisma did the v7 update, they’re already at v7.2+, but something as big as Supabase still shows the outdated (and breaking) usage pattern of schema.prisma in the Prisma quickstart guide.

As much as it is a careless act from the docs teams at Supabase and Prisma, I believe it’s an even more careless act from the community and developers, who don’t have to go through the docs anymore because both these tools provide the “Agentic Context” button which you can use to do the due integrations. A few years back, documentation was something, at least as far as I know, that was “maintained” by people from the team behind that tool, but mostly kept tidy and updated by the community who relied on those docs.