alt Hacker NewsWe rolled our own documentation site
Comments
For folks not familiar with this project:
>Tangled is a decentralized Git hosting and collaboration platform.
it is _not_ about Literate Programming (which is what I was expecting).
A previous active discussion of this project:
Mintlify is really good. If you're a serious developer tool not sure why you wouldn't use it. For example I went into your docs and I don't see AI chat so I can ask quick, natural language questions. No MCP I can install so Cursor can query. Prob no llms.txt. No quick Copy to Markdown. This stuff is table stakes, if you don't have it and a competitor does, I'm not even considering you guys
It's just a worse developer experience. Fine if you aren't a serious business, but yeah I wouldn't play down the value of Mintlify or similar products. It's seriously good and it's why huge companies use it
Congrats on the launch!
I run a documentation product, ReadMe. There's a lot of reasons to roll your own, but I'd recommend you also look into a third-party tool like us. One of the biggest reasons to use a product is that the building v1 is easy, but keeping it up to date over time is a lot tougher... you're stuck remembering how to deploy, figuring out a workflow, dealing with multiple versions, etc.
You also just don't get a ton of really great features for your developers... fast typeahead search, AI tools (which your developers increasingly really want), navigation, accessibility and more. ReadMe also lets your developers play around with you API locally and get copy-and-paste code snippets.
(If you're deciding between your own and ReadMe, email me! [email protected]; would love to talk)
Talking about search on a static docs site, has anyone tried a static pre-generated search like https://lunrjs.com/ ?