Mirna Wong

"By all means, move at a glacial pace." — Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada

There's another scene in The Devil Wears Prada that I think about more than that one. If you haven't seen it yet, I'll try not to spoil it for you. Miranda turns to Andy (Miranda's assistant) and explains, with such impatience, that the cerulean blue in Andy's "lumpy sweater" didn't come out of thin air — it's traced back through a chain of deliberate fashion decisions made years earlier, by people who thought carefully about every choice. The sweater Andy bought from the store was the end of a long chain of deliberate curation, carefully veiled to protect the illusion that the sweater effortlessly came into existence.

That's how I'd describe documentation, especially in the AI era. A user — could be a developer, analyst, data engineer, tech writer 😜 — asks an AI tool a question and gets an answer. They don't need to see every decision in the chain behind it: what to include, how to structure it, where the gaps are, what needs updating. But those decisions shape every answer they get. Somewhere upstream, a docs team is making careful, deliberate choices that ripple all the way down to the moment the answer lands in the user's editor.

This blog discusses how docs teams are trying to bring those decisions closer to users — and why that architecture matters more than ever in the AI era.