Your static documentation checker

Roman Krivtsov — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:55:44 +0000

Your static documentation checker

Ducku

Ducku addresses this problem by treating documentation as something that must be monitored continuously, just like code quality or infrastructure drift. It is not a generator or a rewriting tool. It is a static documentation checker that verifies consistency between documentation and the actual system state.

Ducku works by extracting structural signals from your repository — environment variables, API routes, service entry points, module imports, directory structure, configuration keys — and comparing them with what is referenced in your READMEs and wiki. When something diverges, it flags it.

This reduces the cognitive load on developers:

You no longer need to remember to “update docs later”
Incomplete documentation no longer accumulates silently
Outdated or misleading sections are detected early

In other words, Ducku lowers the cost of correctness, not the cost of writing.

Current Capabilities

Entity presence checking: Detects when environment variables, config keys, ports, API routes, or script names appear in documentation but not in code (and the other way around).
Parallel entity coverage: Identifies groups of similar items (services, ETL jobs, lambda handlers, CLI commands) and flags undocumented additions.
Dead module analysis: Detects files that are not imported/used anywhere — either entry points that deserve explanation or obsolete artifacts.
URL integrity check: Detects broken or outdated links to internal or external resources.
Spell and style consistency: Basic hygiene that normally gets ignored.

This is already enough to reduce a large portion of silent documentation drift in real projects.

What Comes Next

We still have many static check use cases in mind, and they will be also eventually implemented, but after that the next step is helping teams answer 2 questions:

Is the semantic meaning of things in docs is correct?
What should be actually documented and what is better left implicit?

The goal is not to force verbose, redundant documentation. Quite the opposite: Ducku will learn patterns of meaningful documentation — the parts where architecture, domain decisions, and operational contracts are encoded — and highlight areas where missing documentation is likely to lead to real onboarding or maintenance cost.

We are starting small — but the direction is:

Documentation consistency as part of CI, not as an afterthought.

If your documentation is not checked, it will rot.

Ducku makes that rot visible.

DEV Community: Roman Krivtsov

Your static documentation checker

Your static documentation checker

Ducku

Current Capabilities

What Comes Next