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Can an agent do?

Can an agent write documentation?

YESRuns end to end

Yes, and it fixes the real problem, which was never writing documentation but keeping it true. An agent regenerates docs as the code changes, which no human team has ever sustainably managed.

Hours back per week
6
Human cost
€2,000–4,500/mo for a technical writer
Agent cost
€20–70/mo

Step by step

A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.

StepHand over?

  • Generate API reference

    YES

    From the code, accurate, and regenerated on every change.

  • Write guides and tutorials

    YES

    And it can execute its own instructions to check they work.

  • Keep docs in sync

    YES

    The actual problem, finally solved. Flags every doc a PR invalidated.

  • Write changelogs

    YES

    From commits, in language a customer understands rather than commit messages.

  • Explain the why

    HALF

    It documents what the code does. Why you chose it lives in someone’s head.

  • Decide the information architecture

    MOSTLY

    A sensible structure. How your users actually think is worth a person’s attention.

4/6 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.

What still needs you

  • Architectural rationale
  • Deciding what deserves documenting
  • The overall narrative

How this goes wrong

Comprehensive documentation nobody can navigate. Agents produce completeness easily and clarity rarely, and a 300-page reference is not better than a good getting-started guide.

What it needs access to

  • Git repository
  • Docs site
  • CI
  • Issue tracker

Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.

The prompt

A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.

documentation.brief

You are my documentation agent. Keep the API reference generated from the code on every merge to main. When a PR changes behaviour, identify every doc page it invalidates and open a PR updating them — list the pages you changed and why. For guides, follow our style: short sentences, working examples, no marketing language. Actually run every code example and confirm it works before publishing. Write the customer-facing changelog from merged PRs in plain language. Where the code makes a non-obvious choice, do not invent a rationale — add a note asking the author why.

Questions people ask

Is generated documentation good enough to publish?

Reference documentation, yes. Conceptual documentation needs a human to decide what the reader is actually trying to do, which is the part that makes docs useful rather than complete.

Want this one actually running?

The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Git repository and Docs site, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.

Set up a documentation agent

This site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.

In context

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