One of the most annoying parts of backend development isn't building APIs.
It's keeping the documentation up to date.
Everyone knows it should happen. Everyone plans to do it. But when you're trying to ship a feature or fix a production issue, documentation is usually the thing that gets pushed to "later."
We had the same problem.
Our backend team keeps all of our API documentation in a Voiden repository. The interesting part isn't just where the documentation lives—it's how it's maintained.
Inside the repository, we have a CLAUDE.md
that tells Claude:
Whenever an API is added or modified, update the relevant documentation before considering the task complete.
So when someone changes an endpoint, Claude automatically updates the docs as part of the same workflow. The developer reviews the changes, commits everything together, and moves on.
No separate documentation task.
No forgotten updates.
No stale examples sitting around for weeks.
The repository is made up of .void
files, which are designed to be AI-readable rather than just human-readable.
That means the documentation isn't tied to Claude.
Today, Claude updates it because that's what our backend team uses.
Tomorrow, I can point another AI at the same repository, and it immediately understands our APIs, examples, conventions, and project context without us having to rewrite everything into a new prompt.
The documentation becomes shared context—not just for developers, but for AI agents too.
That's something I didn't appreciate at first.
We're no longer writing docs just for humans.
We're writing documentation that both humans and AI can work with.
Most people treat files like CLAUDE.md
as project setup.
We've started treating them as part of our engineering process.
Instead of saying:
"Don't forget to update the docs."
We encode that rule once.
Then every future task follows it automatically.
It's a tiny workflow change, but it's removed one of those recurring problems every engineering team eventually runs into.
I'm curious what other repetitive engineering habits people have pushed into their AI instruction files.
check out more at ** Voiden**.