If Your Documentation Takes Two Clicks to Open, It’s Already Falling Behind

Over the years, I’ve worked on all kinds of projects—big, small, chaotic, overengineered, “temporary,” allegedly well-structured, and everything in between. And yet one pattern has been hilariously consistent:

The documentation is always missing, outdated, or buried in some forgotten corner of Confluence guarded by a 2019 timestamp.

Every project claims to have documentation.

Every team promises they’ll keep it updated.

And every developer confidently says, “Don’t worry, I’ll write it later,” which, as we all know, is the documentation equivalent of saying “the cheque is in the mail.”

After watching this cycle repeat itself more times than I’d like to admit, I realized something simple but brutally true:

Documentation only survives if it lives as close to the code as possible—because developers (myself included) are lazy creatures.

And from that, another realization came – the main problem with outdated documentation is the fact that ...