Toolchain Smoke Tests: Catching Docs Decay Before It Ships
Docs rot. I've watched it happen on every team I've worked with. You write a stellar guide in January, and by March the CLI flags have changed, a dependency dropped a feature, and the example that once ran perfectly now errors out with a stack trace nobody wants to debug. The worst part? Nobody notices until release day, when a customer hits that broken command and your support inbox lights up. This is where toolchain smoke tests come in. Not the ones that check your code compiles—those are old news. I mean tests that check your documentation still works: the commands run, the paths exist, the API examples match the schema. It's a niche practice, but it can save you from shipping lies to your users. The Silence Before the Scream: Where Docs Decay A day in the life of stale docs Friday, 4:47 PM.