How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents
The a16z Show
a16z
4.2 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey guys, here's your docs that are way better now on middle of life. |
| 0:05.0 | Take a look. |
| 0:07.0 | And that's when I realized the beauty of having failed so many times, which was in failing so |
| 0:15.0 | many times and building so many ideas that didn't work, when something did, there was no |
| 0:20.0 | mistaking it. It's very important to solve one |
| 0:23.4 | problem correctly. And even right now, as we're experimenting and launching new products, we're |
| 0:29.4 | hyper-focused on getting one person who loves what we're building as opposed to a thousand |
| 0:34.7 | people who are going to just feel meh about it. |
| 0:38.3 | It's still the small things that don't scale that really spark the customer love |
| 0:43.1 | and the thing that goes the extra mile, if you will, is how we think about things, right? |
| 0:47.3 | If you go the extra mile that in a way that people don't expect, you know, imagine. |
| 0:54.3 | For most of the Internet's history, documentation has been an afterthought. |
| 0:58.3 | Something you write after the product ships, something meant to explain where already exists. |
| 1:02.7 | But what happens when the reader isn't human anymore? For decades, docs were written for people. |
| 1:07.3 | They explained APIs, answered questions, and slowly drifted out of date as products evolved. |
| 1:12.3 | That decay was accepted as normal because documentation was treated as reference material, |
| 1:16.4 | not infrastructure. In the last few years, that assumption has broken. Coding agents support bots |
| 1:21.7 | and internal AI tools now read documentation directly. Docs are no longer just explanatory, |
| 1:27.0 | but also operational input. |
| 1:28.7 | When they're wrong or outdated, systems break. This creates attention. Documentation matters more |
| 1:33.8 | than ever, but keeping it accurate has always been one of the hardest problems in software. |
| 1:38.2 | Static docs don't survive fast-moving products, especially in an agent-driven world. In this episode, |
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