Documentation Writer Skill

Degree of freedom: MIXED. Voice and structure [HIGH freedom]; pre-documentation checks and the verification statement [LOW freedom — run exactly].

Create clear, useful documentation for developers.

Core principle — write for the reader's mental model first

Write in plain language. Follow references/plain-language-ste.md: short active sentences, one instruction per sentence, one meaning per word, and no AI tells. It also has a Vale prose-lint recipe to keep the docs that way.

Documentation rarely fails because it's incomplete. It fails because the reader can't build a mental model fast enough to care. So before any reference detail, answer the questions the reader is silently asking — in their words, in this order: