Documentation stopped being the manual.
It became the most load-bearing surface in your product, and most teams are still renting it from someone else. Here is the case for owning it.
You Don't Own Your Docs
Documentation is the most load-bearing artifact in your product, and most teams rent the one copy that ships. Ownership is an economic argument, not an ideological one.
Your Docs Have a Second Reader Now
Something reads your API docs that has no eyes, and it reads the page, not a special file. Clean, structured output is a structural advantage the subscription model is built to ignore.
pkg.go.dev Isn't Your Docs Site
Go got the hard part of documentation right years ago. The only piece missing was a site the project actually controls.
Don't Replace Doxygen
Doxygen's parser is the best C++ documentation engine ever written. The XML it emits is the seam everything modern builds on.
Stop Renting Your OpenAPI Docs
OpenAPI was designed to be portable. The spec is already yours; the rendering is the only part most teams give away.
Documentation Is the Contract Surface
For most of software's history, docs were the manual. Now they're the contract surface humans and agents both ground on.