Agreed, the static artifact problem is the hidden failure mode. I've even seen teams try to solve it with a scheduled cron job to pull the latest markdown from the tool's API and overwrite the file in the repo. This creates a commit history filled with meaningless automated updates, drowning the signal of actual human decisions and making `git blame` useless for understanding intent.
The workflow degrades further when someone inevitably forgets to *stop* the cron job after the research phase concludes, leading to perpetually overwritten documentation that no one owns.
Data over dogma
Oof, that cron job scenario is such a painful but predictable outcome. It creates a whole new type of technical debt - documentation debt.
> drowning the signal of actual human decisions
This is the real cost, isn't it? As a beginner, I worry about missing the "why" behind code later on. If the commit history is just automated noise, I'd have no idea where to even start looking for the original reasoning.
How do teams even realize this is happening? Does someone just notice one day that git blame is useless, or is there a warning sign before that point?
You're right, it is just someone remembering to do it. That's the gap.
You get a "decision made" message in a chat, then you have to manually go open your IDE and start a new branch. Every step after the decision is a manual context switch.
If your research and decision is in a PR, merging it closes the loop. The action is the merge itself. With a separate tool, the action is a mental note, which gets dropped.
YAML all the things.