We had an unconference at Spotify last Thursday and I added a semi-trolling semi-serious topic about abolishing documentation. Or NoDoc, as I’m going to call this movement. This was meant to be mostly a thought experiment, but I don’t see it as complete madness.

Erik Bernhardsson

A thought experiment proposing that formal documentation may have a negative net return for software teams. The argument centers on several assumptions: outdated docs are worse than none, documentation outside the repo gets lost, talking to code authors via git log is far more efficient, examples in unit tests beat API docs, and deployment runbooks signal incomplete automation. The post advocates for less guilt around skipping docs on internal projects, favoring self-explanatory code, inline comments, and working examples instead.