Developers Don’t Need More Docs

Dennis Pilarinos

March 19, 2025

Developer documentation is a paradox. Developers spend countless hours writing it, yet it’s almost always outdated, incomplete, or buried in pages no one reads.

The numbers are staggering:

64% of developers spend over 30 minutes daily searching for information. [Statista]
26% waste more than an hour. [Statista]

That adds up to weeks of lost development time every year.

Documentation isn’t the problem. Context is.

Despite best efforts, making documentation truly useful is nearly impossible.

The problem isn’t just that it goes out of date the moment it’s published, it’s how developers actually use it.

When starting a new project or hitting a roadblock, developers don’t need pages of structured docs. They need answers. That means understanding not just how the code works, but why it works that way.

Documentation alone rarely provides the full picture. Every code change comes with decisions, documents, and discussions scattered across the tools a team collaborates with - a Confluence page might outline how an API is supposed to work, but it won’t capture the latest bug fixes, workarounds, or trade-offs discussed in Slack.

The gap between how documentation is written (a general reference) and what developers actually need (specific, nuanced answers) is why they end up asking teammates instead.

The real problem isn't the documentation itself - it’s scattered context.

Centralized documentation is not the solution.

Many teams have tried to make information easier to find by centralizing documentation into one place.

But can centralized documentation really solve this problem?

There are different types of context that developers need to make sense of their code. A short list of examples:

Official documentation
Source code and comments
Pull Request history
Real-time discussions
Issue and project status
Product specifications
Design documents
…and many more

Not all context can be included in documentation, nor should it be. Storing everything in one place only makes documentation harder to organize, navigate, and update.

The better solution is to surface the context whenever developers need it.

Find the right knowledge at the right time.

A single source of truth for documentation doesn't exist. And it doesn't need to.

You don’t need to look far for the context you need, if you have a tool that:

Searches across your code, docs, and discussions
Provides practical answers to a developer’s question
Stays up-to-date with code changes
Surfaces information when and where you need it
Makes documentation easier to create and maintain

This is why we built Unblocked.

Unblocked augments your code with knowledge scattered in GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and more. Developers get answers instantly, without having to interrupt a coworker.

With Unblocked, it doesn’t matter where you document decisions. As long as they’re written down somewhere, Unblocked can connect the dots.

"Unblocked has made years of scattered documentation and historical context about our codebase useful and relevant without any work on our part. Every developer now has the ability to tap into past discussions and decisions to fill their knowledge gaps, regardless of their tenure.” – Alex Mallet, EVP Engineering at Forto

Talk to us about how to save 1-2 hours per engineer, per day, with Unblocked.