Documentation is Dead. Long Live Documentation.

Traditional documentation practices have failed for decades because knowledge is richest at the moment it's created, not after the fact. The author argues that instead of asking engineers to write docs post-work, AI coding tools can automatically capture decisions, patterns, and insights during the actual work session. This creates a living, compounding knowledge base — decisions with rationale, recurring patterns, and bug fixes — that stays current because it's generated from the work itself rather than maintained separately.