How to write technical documentation: a complete guide (August 2026)

Technical documentation remains accurate when teams distinguish between content that should be generated and content that requires human authorship, rather than maintaining all material manually as systems change. Using the Diátaxis framework, the guide separates documentation into tutorials, how-to guides, reference material, and explanations, arguing that API reference should be derived automatically from machine-readable specifications while conceptual guidance, procedures, and context should be written and reviewed by people. It recommends identifying specific audiences early, using templates for each content type, storing authored material in version-controlled Markdown or MDX, and enforcing style, specification, link, and code-sample checks through continuous integration. Effective procedural documentation emphasizes runnable examples, prerequisites, expected results, troubleshooting, and consistent terminology, while explanations add the practical judgment that API specifications cannot convey. The guide also notes that documentation increasingly serves AI coding agents through formats such as llms.txt, raw Markdown endpoints, MCP servers, and API catalogs. Fern is presented as a platform that generates API references, multilingual code samples, and AI-readable documentation from API definitions while supporting Git-based conceptual content, access controls, and audience-specific filtering.

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