Single Source of Truth for Docs, ADRs & API Contracts — Now in Archyl - Archyl Blog

Architecture knowledge is scattered across whiteboards, Confluence pages, Swagger files, and GitHub wikis. Archyl now supports Documentation, ADRs, and API Contracts as first-class citizens — all centralized alongside your C4 architecture diagrams.

Single Source of Truth for Docs, ADRs & API Contracts — Now in Archyl

March 2026

Software architecture doesn't live in one place. It lives in diagrams drawn on whiteboards, decisions buried in Confluence pages, API specs scattered across Swagger files, and onboarding docs lost somewhere in a GitHub wiki. If you've ever spent 30 minutes hunting for "that ADR we wrote last quarter," you already know the problem.

Today, we're changing that. Archyl now supports Documentation, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and API Contracts as first-class citizens — all centralized alongside your C4 architecture diagrams.

The Problem

Every engineering team accumulates architectural knowledge over time. The challenge is never creating documentation — it's keeping it discoverable, consistent, and connected to the systems it describes.

Here's what typically happens:

  • Architecture diagrams live in Miro, Lucidchart, or a dusty draw.io file in your repo.
  • ADRs are Markdown files in a /docs/adr folder that nobody remembers to update.
  • API contracts sit in a standalone Swagger UI or a Stoplight workspace, disconnected from the services they describe.
  • General documentation is spread across Confluence, Notion, README files, and tribal knowledge.

The result? Context is fragmented. New engineers piece together the system from five different tools. Decisions lose their rationale. API specs drift from reality. Architecture diagrams become decoration rather than documentation.

What We Built

Archyl already maps your software ecosystem with AI-powered discovery and interactive C4 model visualizations. Now, it brings your documentation, decisions, and contracts into the same workspace — linked directly to the architecture elements they describe.

Every document, ADR, and API contract in Archyl is contextually connected to your C4 model. When you view a system, container, or component, you see not just its relationships and dependencies, but also the decisions that shaped it, the APIs it exposes, and the documentation that explains it.

No more tab-switching. No more stale links. One place for everything.

ADRs as First-Class Citizens

Architecture Decision Records capture the why behind your architecture. In Archyl, ADRs are structured documents with proper lifecycle tracking — proposed, accepted, deprecated, or superseded.

What makes them powerful here is linkage. Each ADR can be attached to specific C4 elements. Wondering why your payment service uses event sourcing? Click the container, find the ADR. Need to understand a deprecated decision before refactoring? It's right there, linked to the component it affected.

ADRs in Archyl follow a structured format — context, decision, and consequences — so your team builds a consistent decision log without extra process overhead.

API Contracts & OpenAPI

Archyl supports OpenAPI, gRPC, and GraphQL contract definitions. You can define your API contracts directly in the platform or sync them from your repository.

Each contract links to the C4 elements that implement or consume it. This means your API documentation is no longer a standalone artifact — it's part of your architecture map. When a container exposes a REST API, the contract is one click away. When a component consumes an external service, the spec is right there.

You can also define server entries, versioning, and endpoint metadata, keeping your contract documentation structured and up to date.

Living Documentation

Static documentation decays. That's why Archyl treats docs as living artifacts tied to your architecture model.

  • Organized by project with folders and drag-and-drop ordering.
  • Linked to C4 elements so documentation stays contextual, not orphaned.
  • AI-powered insights flag when architecture changes may have made existing documentation outdated.
  • Collaborative — team members can comment on any element, document, or decision, with threaded discussions and resolution tracking.

When your architecture evolves, your documentation evolves with it. Archyl's AI-generated insights surface inconsistencies between your diagrams, decisions, and docs, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Get Started

If you're already using Archyl, Documentation, ADRs, and API Contracts are available in your project dashboard today. Navigate to any project, and you'll find dedicated sections for each.

If you're new to Archyl, here's the short version: connect your GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repositories, let AI discover your architecture, and start building a single source of truth that your entire team can rely on.

No more scattered docs. No more forgotten decisions. No more API specs that live in a different universe from the systems they describe.

Your architecture deserves a single source of truth. Try Archyl today.