The argument that AI makes documentation obsolete confuses two different activities: producing prose and preserving operational knowledge.
An agent can generate prose cheaply. It cannot recover a missing deployment condition, a forgotten modifier-click behavior, or a test nobody recorded. When evidence is absent, fluent text can make the gap harder to see.
Ben Halpern's current DEV discussion frames this as the myth of a “post-documentation era.” I want to make the product decision measurable: does the work item contain enough documented evidence for an agent to act and for a human to review it?
Five coverage dimensions
Use a 100-point scorecard:
