What is Living Documentation?
Living documentation, introduced by Cyrille Martraire, rejects the premise that docs have to rot. The idea: treat documentation as an output of the codebase (extracted, generated, or continuously validated) rather than as a parallel artifact that someone has to remember to update. C4 models discovered from code and conformance rules enforced in CI are both instances of this idea.
Related terms
- Architecture as Code — Describing system architecture in a versioned, text-based format so it can be reviewed, diffed, and validated like source code.
- Architecture Drift — The widening gap between documented architecture and the system that actually runs in production.
- MCP Server — A server implementing the Model Context Protocol so AI coding assistants can query project context through a standardized tool interface.