Documentation Used to Be Dead Weight. Now It's the Seatbelt.

For most of my career, documentation was the thing everyone agreed was important and nobody wanted to do. It was extra weight. It slowed you down. By the time you finished writing it, it was already out of date.

Various tools came along to help — wikis, knowledge bases, documentation platforms. They made it easier to create and store documentation, but they also created their own overhead and friction. Another tool to maintain. Another system to keep current. It felt like extra weight attached to every step forward.

That’s changing in a fundamental way.

Agents can generate documentation, maintain it, and validate it against the actual state of the system. Not as an afterthought, not as a quarterly exercise — continuously, as part of the workflow itself. Documentation stops being something you produce and starts being something the system maintains.

At agentic speed, this matters enormously. When systems are moving fast, evolving fast, and making decisions autonomously, documentation isn’t bureaucratic overhead anymore. It’s your seatbelt. It’s how you know what’s happening, how you trace decisions back to their source, and how you maintain a mental model of a system that’s operating faster than you can manually track.

The shift isn’t that documentation suddenly became important. It was always important. The shift is that we can finally keep it current without it being a drag on everything else.