Your Software Architecture Documentation Is Lying to You

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 12:38:46 +0530

“The documentation is in the code.” I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this, usually from a well meaning senior engineer right before I spend the next three days spelunking through a codebase just to figure out what a single microservice is supposed to do.

Let’s be honest with each other. Most software architecture documentation is a ghost. It’s a pale, outdated echo of a system that once existed, haunting your Confluence space or a forgotten Google Drive folder. You follow the README, and it breaks. You look at a diagram, and it shows services that were decommissioned a year ago.

adr on Kuldeep Pisda

Your Software Architecture Documentation Is Lying to You