The documentation is a person, and they are on holiday

Description and use

Documentation can silently become stale, forcing teams to rely on a single person. Deploying Celmis provides automated change detection, regeneration, provenance tracking, and failure alerts, reducing dependency on a single individual.

Problem

Documentation can become stale silently, leading new joiners to rely on outdated or missing information and waste time asking a single person for answers.

Outcome

Documentation staleness is now observable and actionable; failures are reported on dashboards, and missing docs are explicitly listed, reducing dependency on a single person.

Workflow

• 1. Register repositories in Celmis. 2. Daily scheduled sweep runs git ls-remote to detect changes. 3. On change, incremental re‑indexing walks git diff and updates reverse index. 4. Notes are regenerated only if source files changed or commit stamp differs. 5. Failed generations raise errors and are visible on a dashboard. 6. Export documentation archives include a MISSING.txt listing repositories with no docs. 7. Provenance blocks record generator, commit, engine, and lookup count for each note.

Evidence

Hand‑written documentation goes stale silently. There is no event.

Source

A run in which every document failed used to report success, because the markdown folder existed. It now raises.

Source

Exporting every repository's documentation as one archive writes a MISSING.txt listing the repositories that have none.

Source