Developer Docs Drafting

Use this skill to draft developer documentation that readers can skim, follow, and apply. It turns audience and plan context into clear page structure and usable prose.

This skill is derived from Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing, especially Chapter 3, "Drafting documentation." It is expanded with paraphrased guidance from Christopher Gales and the Splunk Documentation Team's The Product Is Docs: Writing Technical Documentation in a Product Development Group, especially Chapter 9, "Learning Objectives," Chapter 14, "Scenario-driven Information Development," and Chapter 25, "Writing SaaS Documentation." Do not copy book prose into user outputs. Source: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7217-6

Quick Start

1. Load guidelines.md to choose the smallest useful reference set.
2. Confirm audience, doc type, one primary reader goal, and learning objective when available.
3. Outline before drafting; treat the outline like pseudocode for the doc.
4. Use workflows/draft-developer-doc.md for full-page drafts.
5. Put the most important information first and make the page easy to skim.

Default Output

When drafting a doc, return: