DEV Community

Cover image for Engineers Don’t Hate Documentation.
Urvisha Maniar
Urvisha Maniar

Posted on

Engineers Don’t Hate Documentation.

They Hate Being Set Up to Fail at It.

Let’s say this clearly:

Engineering teams don’t avoid documentation because they don’t care.
They avoid it because documentation, as it exists today, is a losing game.

It’s slow.
It’s invisible.
It’s never finished.
And the moment you’re done, it’s already wrong.

So eventually, even the best teams stop trying.

Not because they’re careless —
but because the system is broken.


“We’ll document it later” is not laziness. It’s self-preservation.

Every engineering team has said it.

“We’ll document this later.”

What they really mean is:

  • “We don’t have time right now.”
  • “This will slow us down.”
  • “It won’t stay accurate anyway.”
  • “No one will thank us for this.”
  • “This will quietly become my responsibility forever.”

Documentation feels like unpaid labor that never ends.

So it gets postponed.
Then ignored.
Then quietly forgotten.


The cost shows up later — and it’s brutal

You don’t feel the pain immediately.
You feel it slowly, everywhere:

  • New engineers take weeks to understand the codebase
  • PR reviews stall because context lives in people’s heads
  • The same explanations repeat in Slack
  • “That one person” becomes a bottleneck
  • Someone leaves — and takes years of knowledge with them
  • Everyone is afraid to touch certain files

The code works.
The team works harder than it should.

This isn’t a documentation problem.
It’s a context problem.


The real issue: documentation doesn’t move at the speed of code

Modern engineering moves fast.

Docs don’t.

Traditional documentation assumes:

  • someone remembers to write it
  • someone keeps it updated
  • someone owns it
  • someone reviews it

That “someone” burns out.

Docs drift away from reality.
Trust erodes.
And eventually, engineers stop opening them altogether.

At that point, documentation becomes worse than useless —
it becomes noise.


That’s why we built Everdone CodeDoc

We didn’t want to “encourage better documentation habits.”

We wanted to remove the burden entirely.

The idea behind Everdone CodeDoc is simple:

Documentation should be a byproduct of code — not a separate job.

CodeDoc automatically generates:

  • clear file-level documentation
  • function-level explanations
  • architectural and dependency context
  • consistent documentation across the entire repository

Not one-off docs.
Not stale wikis.
Not heroic efforts.

Just living context that stays close to the code — and stays current.

No meetings.
No tickets.
No “we’ll clean this up later.”


Why we’re offering early-access pricing right now

As a Christmas 2025 early-access offer, we’re intentionally making CodeDoc easy to try — and hard to ignore:

  • 200 files free for AI-generated documentation
  • $0.05 per file after that (50% early-access discount)

This isn’t designed for “trying it on one folder.”

It’s priced so teams can:

  • document entire repositories, not samples
  • make documentation the default, not a side quest
  • feel real onboarding and PR-review speed-ups
  • decide with real usage, not demos

No contracts.
Access for the whole team.


This matters more than teams want to admit

If any of these sound familiar:

  • “Only a few people really understand this part”
  • “PRs take forever to review”
  • “New hires keep asking the same questions”
  • “Nobody wants to touch this file”
  • “We should really document this someday”

That’s not a future problem.

That’s a now problem.

And it compounds every week you delay.


If you’ve ever thought: _‘This codebase deserves better docs’…

This is the easiest moment you’ll ever get.

No migration.
No process change.
No cultural overhaul.

Just documentation that finally keeps up with reality.

👉 Try Everdone CodeDoc
200 files free. No contracts. Team-wide access.
https://everdone.ai/

Top comments (0)