The Doc Draft Ledger: Price Verification Before You Send a Section to the Model

Description and use

Using a YAML ledger, teams estimate review time per doc section before AI drafting, enforcing a weekly budget and speeding up the review workflow.

Problem

Documentation teams waste hours validating AI‑generated content that contains many high‑stakes claims, code, and external links.

Outcome

By pricing review effort upfront, teams keep AI drafting within a manageable budget, cutting review time from hours to minutes for low‑risk sections while focusing human attention on high‑stakes content.

Workflow

• 1. Create a ledger.yaml with budget and section metadata (id, path, class, words, claim_density, code_blocks, external_links).
• 2. Run ledger_check.py to calculate estimated review minutes for each section.
• 3. Integrate the script into the CI pipeline; fail the merge if total estimated minutes exceed the weekly budget.
• 4. Use the cost estimates to decide which sections the model drafts, which are outlined, and which stay fully human‑written.
• 5. Review only the sections flagged as high‑cost, reducing overall review time.

Evidence

The ledger turns each section into an estimated review cost using weights, not magic.

Source

A two‑thousand‑word section may take the model twenty seconds to produce and a reviewer ninety minutes to validate.

Source