You came for a technical documentation template — the structure of a doc that a new engineer can actually onboard from. It's below; copy it. But technical docs have the worst drift problem of any document: they describe a system that changes every day, and the doc is updated by hand, when someone remembers, which is rarely. Within a sprint the docs and the code disagree, and a reader can't tell which paragraphs to trust. Draftlize gives you the same structure, with the decisions behind the docs as cards that flag when the system moves past them.
Good technical documentation answers what a reader needs in roughly this order — from "what is this" to "it's on fire, what do I do." Not every doc needs all eight; skip what doesn't apply.
What this system or component is, the problem it solves, and who it's for — in a few sentences a newcomer can read first. If a reader can't tell whether this doc is relevant to them from the top, the rest won't get read.
The fastest path to a working setup — prerequisites, install, a minimal example that runs. The highest-traffic section; optimize it ruthlessly, because a failed first five minutes is where most readers leave.
The components, how they interact, and the key decisions behind the shape — ideally with a diagram. This is the section that saves an engineer a week, and the one most tied to decisions that change.
Endpoints, functions, parameters, return values, errors. Exhaustive and precise; this is lookup material, not narrative. Best generated from the source where possible so it can't silently fall behind.
Environment variables, settings, flags — what each does, defaults, and valid values. The section people grep for at 2am, so completeness beats prose.
How to deploy, monitor, scale, and recover — the operational reality, not just the happy path. What the dashboards mean, what the alerts mean, what to do when each fires.
The common failures and their fixes, written from real incidents. The section that turns a 30-minute outage into a 3-minute one — and the first to go stale as failure modes change.
What changed, when, and who owns this. The metadata that tells a reader whether to trust the doc at all — a doc last touched a year ago is a warning, not a reference.
For the design-decision layer above this, see the technical design document; for where docs live, the knowledge base.
Code changes daily; docs change when someone remembers. The gap opens immediately and compounds. Unlike most documents, technical docs have an authoritative source of truth right next to them — the code — and the doc is always the one that's behind.
A doc that's 80% correct is more dangerous than one that's missing, because the reader trusts the wrong 20%. Without a signal for which sections are current, the whole doc gets quietly distrusted — and then people stop writing docs at all.
The architecture section explains a design decision — why this queue, why this boundary. When that decision is reversed in code, nothing tells the doc. The explanation outlives the thing it explained, confidently describing a system that no longer works that way.
In Draftlize the architecture and design rationale in your docs are cards linked to the actual decisions — "we use a queue here because…" points at the decision card, not a paragraph retyped from memory. The doc references the decision instead of duplicating it.
Reverse the design decision in code and the doc section that explained it auto-flags stale — the way a build system invalidates everything downstream of a changed file. The reader gets a signal, instead of trusting a confident paragraph that's now wrong.
Claude Code or Cursor reads the linked decisions over MCP before it touches the code — so the agent works from the architecture as it is now, and when it changes the design, it can write the decision back, keeping the doc and the code on the same version.
Technical docs are the only document with the truth sitting right next to them in the code — and they're always the one that's behind.Keep the structure. Link the docs to the decisions, so the code can flag them stale.
An overview and purpose, a getting-started guide, an architecture section, an API or reference section, configuration, a runbook for operations, troubleshooting, and a changelog with owners. Not every doc needs all of them — match the sections to what the reader actually needs.
A technical design document (TDD) is written before building to propose and align on an approach. Technical documentation describes the system as built, for people who use or maintain it. The TDD is a decision; the documentation is a reference.
Generate reference material from the source where possible, keep docs close to the code (docs-as-code), and link the explanations to the decisions they rest on so a change flags the affected sections. The failure mode is hand-maintained prose with no signal for which parts are still true.
Treating documentation like source code — written in plain-text formats like Markdown, stored in version control next to the code, reviewed in pull requests, and built with a pipeline. It keeps docs closer to changes and makes drift more visible, though it does not eliminate it on its own.
Use the structure above, or keep the decisions behind your docs as cards in Draftlize linked to the design — so when the code reverses a decision, the doc section that explained it flags stale, and your coding agent always reads the current architecture.
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