Your docs live next to your code. That's the docs-as-code promise — version control, pull request reviews, CI/CD pipelines. It works beautifully.
Until your repo hits 100,000 files.
The problem nobody talks about
Our team runs a documentation portal that pulls content from dozens of large repositories. Each doc build needs a handful of markdown files and images from repos containing hundreds of thousands of files. The naive approach — git clone — is painfully slow and wasteful.
We tried sparse checkout. We tried shallow clones. We tried the git provider APIs directly. Each came with its own problems:
