You can build something brilliant and still lose it in the fog.
I spent today creating a map of someone else’s code.
Not rewriting it.
Not improving it.
Just documenting where everything lives and why.
Most developers skip this part.
They think documentation is what you do when you’re done.
It’s not.
Documentation is what you do so the next person doesn’t have to reverse engineer your thinking.
A codebase without documentation is a mansion with no hallway lights.
You know where the kitchen is because you built it.
The next person walks in circles.
Today I analyzed 19 components and traced how they fit together.
I wrote down the pattern.
I showed the architecture.
I made the invisible visible.
This feels boring until it saves someone three hours of confusion.
Then it feels like magic.
Here’s what most people miss about documentation.
It’s not for machines to read.
It’s for humans to think.
When you write down how something works, you find the places where it doesn’t.
You see the gaps.
You spot the shortcuts you took.
You understand your own work better than before you started.
The real work isn’t in the code.
It’s in the explanation.
Everything worth knowing is simple once someone shows you the shape of it.
The person who documents the system owns the system.
Everyone else just guesses.