Four-Step Pipeline Proposes Freezing API Identifiers Before AI Drafts Documentation
A software engineering workflow argues that AI-generated API documentation becomes unreliable when models are allowed to invent identifiers not present in the actual codebase. The proposed approach freezes paths, schema names, error codes, and environment keys as a build artifact before any model drafts prose, restricting the model to formatting already-extracted facts. A four-step pipeline — extract, draft, lint, and overlay — assigns the model only the drafting role, while a lint step rejects unknown nouns and obligation verbs. Time-bound commitments such as deprecation dates, support promises, and compatibility windows are reserved for a human-maintained overlay file that the model cannot edit. The extract step is designed to run in standard CI pipelines, using trusted sources like OpenAPI documents and contract tests rather than comments or README files, which can drift without triggering build failures.
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