A small company with one unglamorous problem.

In 2021 a developer-tools company shipped a version 3. The documentation was updated for the launch, carefully, by four people over three weeks.

Eleven months later, someone counted. Of 340 pages, 61 stated something that was no longer true. Not one of them had been wrong on launch day. Each had been quietly invalidated by an ordinary change — a default lowered here, an option renamed there, a header that started being computed differently.

Priya was responsible for that documentation set. The obvious fix, a quarterly audit, found things eleven weeks after readers did. The other obvious fix, a checklist line in the pull-request template, depended on the person changing a constant knowing that a page three directories away described it.

So she built something that read the diff and told her which pages to look at. It was a scrappy pile of regular expressions and it was wrong constantly, but the shape of it was right, and the part it could not do — reasoning about whether a sentence was still true — became possible at about the same time.

Daniel joined to build the part that is not a model: the graph from a symbol in a repository to the paragraph that documents it. Docsmith was incorporated in march 2023.