Why Your Docs-as-Code Toolchain Is Holding You Back (And How To Fix It Before You Scale)

🚨 That DIY Docs-as-Code setup you cobbled together in your spare time? It may be the reason your team dreads updating documentation

Your documentation stack probably started out like an IKEA bookshelf—affordable, lightweight, and vaguely Scandinavian. But now it’s likely to be wobbling under the weight of real use, and every new contributor feels like they’re one [git push] away from total collapse.

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It All Started So Innocently…

Back in the beginning—when your team was just you, a Markdown file, and a dream—Docs-as-Code felt like the future. You had Git. You had CI/CD. You had those smug little green checkmarks ✅ on your pull requests.

“Look at me,” you thought, sipping cold brew out of a beaker. “I’m treating documentation like code!”

And it was great…until it wasn’t.

The moment your team grew, your lovely little system turned into something less like a sleek engineering practice and more like an escape room designed by someone with a grudge against technical writers.

The Promise of Docs-as-Code (And Where It Breaks Down)

Docs-as-Code started with smart goals:

• bring documentation into the developer workflow

• use version control

• make updates fast

• automate publishing

It was a way to give writers control, visibility, and collaboration tools without waiting for our IT team to develop a workable solution.

And it worked—at least at first.

Docs-as-Code works well—until teams stretch it beyond its original purpose

But as teams grow, the cracks begin to show. What once felt lightweight and agile becomes a tangle of scripts, custom tools, and tribal knowledge. Writers spend more time learning Git workflows than writing. SMEs avoid contributing because the setup feels like a trap door. Automation jobs break with every tool update.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Docs-as-Code works well—until teams stretch it beyond its original purpose. Without making adjustments, your setup won't keep up as you scale.

As technical documentation professional Sarah Moir says in a blog post, "Docs-as-code is a much-vaunted workflow and toolchain for writing, publishing, and maintaining technical documentation—but in practice, docs-as-code doesn't deliver on its promise.”

Warning Signs Your Toolchain Is Holding You Back

You may not need a complete overhaul—but if these signs sound familiar, your Docs-as-Code toolchain needs a tune-up:

• Writers troubleshoot pipelines more than they do writing content. When builds fail because of broken links, syntax issues, or missing dependencies, you've got tech debt.
  
  Information technology expert, Kevin Casey, says, “We take on technical debt for reasons similar to why we take on financial debt: We need something now (or very soon) that we don’t have the “cash” to pay for in full. So we borrow to get what we need. With software, this generally means making coding or design decisions that are sub-optimal – or that we know will need to be addressed and updated in the future – in order to get what we want or need into production sooner.”
  
  Mike Duensing, former CTO and EVP Engineering at Skuid, says, “Technical debt – or code debt – is the consequence of software development decisions that result in prioritizing speed or release over the [most] well-designed code. It is often the result of using quick fixes and patches rather than full-scale solutions.”
  

• Onboarding new contributors is a slog. If new writers need a crash course in Git, Makefiles, and CI jobs to fix a typo, the barrier is too high.
  

• Style and structure are all over the place. Without governance, your documentation becomes a patchwork of tones, formats, and half-baked reuse.
  

• You rely on a single person to maintain the system. If your "Docs DevOps" lead takes PTO, does your publishing grind to a halt?

Docs-as-Code wins break down when documentation becomes too tightly coupled to the engineering mindset and infrastructure. Ironically, that rigidity creates fragility.

Related reading: Better docs, less pain: the case for new docs-as-code standards

The Hidden Costs of a '“Frankenstack”

Most Docs-as-Code setups evolve gradually—Markdown plus Git, then add CI, then link checking, then custom scripts, then a static site generator, then a metadata linter, then…

Before long, your team is juggling half a dozen tools, each with its own quirks. The result?

• Writer fatigue. Writers aren't DevOps engineers. They shouldn't have to be.

• Slower delivery. Ironically, what was supposed to speed things up now creates bottlenecks.

• More risk. Minor errors become big outages as you scale, and tool dependencies become liabilities.

That's not hypothetical—many teams using Markdown pipelines report hitting walls with reuse, scalability, and governance.

Are you building a future-ready foundation or 'Franken-stitching' together a system already groaning under pressure?

How to Fix It Before You Scale

You don't need to throw everything out. But you do need a system that grows with you. Start here:

• Audit your stack. List every tool and script. What's critical? What's redundant? What breaks most often?

• Standardize workflows. Make processes repeatable. Define who does what, when, and how.

• Create a governance model, use templates, enforce a style guide, define metadata standards, and add structure before entropy wins.

• Make contributing easier. Use pre-built contribution templates. Add preview builds. Write a human-friendly contributor guide.

• Plan for the team you'll have tomorrow. More writers = more surface area for errors. Fix cracks now, not when they're canyons.

When to Graduate to a Better Platform

At some point, maintaining your custom pipeline costs more than it's worth. That's when it's time to consider:

• Structured content authoring. Something like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) or another component-based approach that supports content reuse and scalability.

• Adopting a component content management system (CCMS). These systems provide real-time collaboration, governance, workflow, and automation at scale. Check out this offering from the folks at Heretto.

• Better contributor UX. Don't force every stakeholder to use Git. Some want to fix a sentence and move on.

Choosing to level up isn't a failure of Docs-as-Code. It's an evolution. The goal is to have the right tools at the right time.

Heike Auch and Anita Lüders from the Technical Communication and Digital Learning department at Bosch Digital advise technical writers to make time to analyze precisely whether the advantages of a closer relationship with the software development team justifies the restrictions Docs-as-Code brings to their work.

Final Thoughts

Docs-as-Code isn't a silver bullet. It's a starting point. It can be lightweight and powerful—but only if you adapt it to your growing needs.

If your current system works, great. But if it's holding you back, now is the time to fix it—before you scale and the stakes increase.

The good news? With thoughtful planning, you can take the best of Docs-as-Code and evolve it into a fast, flexible, and future-proof documentation practice.

Related reading: Introduction to DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)