Documentation
Transparent process creates documentation as a side effect
The best documentation is a side effect, not a deliverable.
Process as Documentation
If a new developer needed to take over tomorrow, what would they find? The answer depends on how transparent the process is. Pull requests that explain what changed and why. Issues that capture decisions. Commit history that tells the story of the project.
When the process is transparent, documentation happens automatically. Nobody sits down to write a handoff document — the trail already exists.
The question isn't "what should be documented?" It's "is the process transparent enough that documentation happens naturally?"
When to Write Deliberately
Sometimes the process doesn't capture it. A complex architectural decision that spans multiple PRs. A non-obvious business rule that isn't evident from the code. A deployment quirk that would trip up the next person. These are worth a few paragraphs in the repo.
But don't maintain wikis nobody reads. Don't write ADRs for decisions that are obvious from the PR. Don't create documentation for documentation's sake. If the process already captured it, writing it again is waste.
AI Changed the Economics
The AI era collapsed the cost of documentation. Decisions happen in minutes — AI documents them in seconds. Pull request descriptions, decision records, summaries of conversations — all generated from work that already happened.
This doesn't mean generating documentation for everything. It means the excuse of "documentation takes too long" no longer holds. When the cost drops to near zero, the only question left is whether the process feeds the right context to the tools.
At Varstatt
In Varstatt, documentation is a byproduct of transparency. The client sees the boards, the code, the PRs, the messages. Every async update documents progress. Every PR explains the change. The client already has the documentation — they just don't call it that.
AI generates markdown decision records from actual conversations, written directly into the repository. No Confluence pages. No separate wikis. The repo is the single source of truth for both code and decisions.