{"slug": "the-future-of-product-documentation", "title": "The Future of Product Documentation", "summary": "A developer who worked at LI.FI, Netlify, Flutterwave, and Shardeum has launched Thally, a tool that connects product repositories to documentation surfaces, identifies content affected by code changes, and opens evidence-backed pull requests for teams to review. The project responds to Mintlify's 2026 State of Knowledge Report, which found that its sites logged 257 million agent requests in August versus 131 million human page loads, while only 7% of surveyed companies had made every knowledge surface readable by agents. The developer argues that keeping documentation accurate for AI coding assistants should become a routine part of shipping software.", "body_md": "Your next customer might integrate your product without ever visiting your documentation site. Their coding assistant will read it for them, choose an approach, and generate the code.\n\nWhat happens when those instructions are outdated?\n\nMintlify’s [2026 State of Knowledge Report](https://www.mintlify.com/blog/the-state-of-knowledge-2026-highlights) highlights the scale of this shift. In August, its sites recorded 257 million agent requests compared with 131 million human page loads. Yet only 7% of surveyed companies had made every knowledge surface readable by agents.\n\nMaking that knowledge accessible is essential. Keeping it accurate is an ongoing responsibility.\n\nAn outdated example served through Markdown or MCP still teaches the wrong approach. Making it easier to retrieve can make the mistake easier to repeat.\n\nConsider that you shipped a change to your API authentication flow. Engineering ships it, and someone in DevRel updates the API reference. But the old approach remains in a quickstart, a support article, and an integration example.\n\nWhich version will a customer’s agent find?\n\nAt LI.FI, Netlify, Flutterwave, and Shardeum, I experienced how much documentation work depended on someone remembering those connections.\n\nAs products grow, that becomes harder to sustain.\n\nI believe keeping product knowledge aligned should become a routine part of shipping software.\n\nEvery meaningful product change should prompt a review of the instructions it affects. Proposed updates should show the evidence behind them.\n\nPeople should retain control over what gets published, especially when release timing, version support, or product intent requires judgment.\n\nThat is the thinking behind [Thally](https://thally.io/).\n\nThally connects product repositories with the places teams explain their products. It identifies affected content and opens evidence-backed pull requests with proposed updates for the team to review.\n\nIts documentation platform serves people and agents from the same source. The ongoing responsibility is keeping that source aligned with the product.\n\nThe question I want teams to ask after a release is simple:\n\nCan someone following our published instructions still succeed?\n\nThat should be part of deciding whether the release is complete.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-future-of-product-documentation", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/ekeneeze/the-future-of-product-documentation-2mn2", "published_at": "2026-09-23 21:38:40+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-23 21:58:30.746679+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "agent-protocols", "ai-crawlers", "developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Thally", "Mintlify", "LI.FI", "Netlify", "Flutterwave", "Shardeum"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-future-of-product-documentation", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-future-of-product-documentation.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-future-of-product-documentation.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-future-of-product-documentation.jsonld"}}