Executable Documentation: When Your Comments Become Tests
The article introduces a new paradigm where documentation is stored as executable state in the AST, verified on every test run, and consumed by both humans and LLMs from a single source of truth.
Why it matters
This approach can help maintain accurate and up-to-date documentation, reducing the risk of LLMs generating incorrect code based on stale information.
Key Points
- 1Documentation often becomes outdated and inconsistent with the actual code
- 2Traditional approaches like docstrings and JSDoc do not effectively verify documentation
- 3Synoema stores documentation as executable state in the AST, with assertions that are tested alongside the code
- 4This ensures that stale documentation fails the test suite, preventing documentation debt from becoming inference debt
Details
The article discusses the problem of documentation drift, where developers forget to update docstrings when the underlying code changes. This can lead to LLMs generating incorrect code based on stale documentation, resulting in failed attempts and wasted tokens. The article introduces Synoema, a new paradigm where documentation is a first-class syntactic element, stored directly in the AST. Synoema uses a triple-dash syntax to capture documentation, including executable assertions that are tested alongside the code. This ensures that stale documentation is caught by the test suite, preventing documentation debt from becoming inference debt. The article walks through the lexing, parsing, and testing pipeline of Synoema's approach, highlighting how it differs from traditional documentation systems.
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