Show HN: Treedocs: Documentation that automatically checks for staleness
Treedocs is a documentation tool that automatically detects and alerts when documentation becomes outdated or stale relative to the code it describes, helping maintain accuracy over time.
Background
- Treedocs is a new tool (just posted to Hacker News' "Show HN" section, where developers demo personal projects) that automatically checks whether software documentation is outdated or "stale."
- The core problem: Documentation quickly drifts out of sync with the actual code as a project evolves. Developers often don't realize the docs are wrong until users get confused or errors appear.
- Treedocs appears to work by tracking which documentation files reference which code files, and flagging when those code files change but the associated docs don't — a form of "documentation freshness" monitoring.
- The project targets a well-known pain point in software engineering: keeping docs accurate is tedious manual work, so they frequently fall behind, harming adoption and developer experience.