I've worked on docs at quite a few companies at this point. Almost every company I've ever seen has built a Rube Goldberg machine and totally overengineered their docs for reasons I simply can't understand. It's funniest when the overengineering doesn't even solve problems better than the vanilla solutions out there like AsciiDoctor and Sphinx. So many useless checks. So much unmaintainable javascript and styling. So many botched search and AI chat implementations. And don't even get me started on Vale, which generally just annoys the hell out of contributors instead of helping them.
Great work on the site, Tangled. Your docs site contains useful instructions and a sidebar that clearly communicates an organization structure. It doesn't peg my CPU or RAM. It's amazing how that makes your site better than 90% of docs sites out there.
One tip: could you add a favicon? Bonus points if it's slightly distinct from your main site's favicon so I can distinguish docs tabs at a glance.
There are probably workarounds, but it's the only limitation I can think of. Otherwise Lunr just works.
Works great.
>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:
note that the mkdocs-material folks are now working on https://zensical.org/ which is in rust and _much_ faster. it solves this specific requirement by autogenerating the navigation based on file structure.
it's still early / under active development, but i recently rebuilt our techdocs on top of it. a simple github workflow to aggregate from our two monorepos + some bash-fu to merge them together and voila! no config file headaches
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! greg@readme.io; would love to talk)
If it's not for you, that's okay! But an increasing number of documentation teams are cross-functional (marketing, sales, engineering, product), and not everyone is comfortable editing content directly in Git and dealing with a release.
Docs are the heart and soul of most devtools, so I think it makes sense a lot of companies want a good product.
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
It's not the site's job to add those features though. If you want that experience there are ways to get it without adding bloat to every page on the web. Scraping a static site and answering questions/summarizing is a solved problem.
It’s so odd for a tech focused crowed to be so opposed to newer technology.
Users are getting used to natural language search, not having it will be perceived as friction.
Users are increasingly turning to agentic coding tools, those tools do best when documentation is available via an MCP server. Not having one will make it harder for people to use your product.
I would ask if you've started a real business but it's clear you haven't. It is 100% on a developer tool startup to provide documentation that is easily accessible. If they don't, customers will struggle to get value. If you think this isn't true, then you are ignoring the gigantic market of companies purchasing documentation products (look at Mintlify's customer base for reference)
There is no way I'm asking my customers to scrape my docs and build their own MCP server and AI assistant just to access it easily.
