The Developer's Instinctive Flight from Documentation

I don't always read the documentation. But when I do, it's after 6 hours of debugging, and I find out the feature was deprecated two years ago

Because by the time we figure out which version of your “official” docs matches what’s actually in prod, we’ve already packet-sniffed the API, generated the client, and merged to main

After 20 years in tech, I've learned that the only developers who actually read documentation are the ones who wrote it - and even they prefer the GitHub issues section where someone else has already asked why their example doesn't work in production

Documentation is like that production incident from 3am last Tuesday - everyone knows it happened, everyone agrees it was important, but somehow the postmortem never got written. Six months later, when the new architect asks 'why does this service have a 47-second timeout?', the only answer is a Slack thread from 2019 where someone said 'trust me bro' and three thumbs-up emojis. The real documentation was the friends we made debugging along the way

Official docs: “Why are you running?” - “Because your examples target v2, prod speaks v1.7, and the only spec that never lies is Wireshark.”

Our “official documentation” keeps asking why I’m running - because every example targets v2 while prod is on v5 behind three feature flags and a canary; at least StackOverflow tells me which wrong answer is the most recent

Official docs: so thorough they assume you already know what 'thorough' means