The Honest Experiment: I Let Scribe Handle My Docs for a Week
I'll be upfront: I've been bad at documentation forever. Not incompetent — I know how to write docs — I'm just chronically unable to prioritize them. My projects end up with READMEs that say "TODO: document this" and API endpoints that exist only in my memory.
So when I installed Scribe and decided to actually let it run for a full week, I was curious. Could it fill the documentation gap in a way that actually stuck, or would it be another AI experiment that felt impressive for 20 minutes and then sat unused?
Here's what actually happened.
Day 1: The First Pass
My test project was a personal API I'd been running for about four months — a small service that aggregates data from a few sources I care about and exposes it through a simple REST interface. About 2,000 lines of code, no tests worth speaking of, and documentation that consisted of one sentence in a README and a comment in the main route file that said "see code."
I pointed Scribe at the project and asked for a first pass. What I got back surprised me.
It produced a structured README with a proper project overview, a setup section, environment variable documentation (it found every env variable in my code, even the one I'd forgotten I was using), and an API reference with endpoint descriptions, parameters, and example curl commands.
Was it perfect? No. A few endpoint descriptions were slightly off — it inferred purpose from function names rather than understanding the actual logic. One section described a feature I'd disabled three months ago that was still referenced in the code. But as a first draft? It was genuinely usable. Better than anything I'd have written in a single sitting.
Day 3: The Iteration
By day three I'd made some changes to the project — added two new endpoints, refactored a module. I asked Scribe to update the docs.
This is where I noticed something interesting. Scribe's documentation templates produce structured output with clear sections, which means updates are surgical rather than wholesale rewrites. The new endpoints appeared in the API reference. The refactored module got updated descriptions. Everything that hadn't changed stayed untouched.
The total time I spent: about 10 minutes reviewing its output and correcting the two things it got slightly wrong. For what I'd previously estimated as a 3-hour documentation task.
Day 5: The Surprise Win
On day five I asked Scribe to write an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) for a design choice I'd made when building the service — why I'd chosen a particular data fetching approach over an alternative I'd considered.
I expected this to be the hard part. ADRs require understanding the reasoning behind decisions, not just the structure of the code. I gave Scribe the context: here's what I built, here's what I considered instead, here's why I went the way I did.
What came back was a properly formatted ADR — context, decision, status, consequences — that I could have dropped straight into a project wiki. It took 8 minutes including my review. I've manually written ADRs that took an hour.
What I appreciated most was how Scribe operates: it stays within its declared scope. It doesn't try to refactor your code, make architectural decisions, or reach beyond its documentation mandate. That constitutional boundary — defined in its SOUL.md before you ever install it — is what makes it safe to run autonomously. You know exactly what it will and won't do.
What Scribe Got Wrong
In the spirit of honesty: a few things.
It doesn't understand intent, only structure. For the most part, Scribe infers what code does from names, patterns, and comments. If your code is well-named and follows reasonable conventions, it's accurate. If you have a function called processData() that does something specific and non-obvious, it'll describe it generically.
It needs context for business logic. Technical structure, Scribe handles well. The "why" behind product decisions requires you to explain it. This is actually fine — you're the one who knows why — but it means you can't fully autopilot the documentation for anything non-trivial.
First drafts need review. Don't publish Scribe's output without reading it. It's a very good first draft, not a finished product. The review step is real and necessary.
The Bottom Line After a Week
My project has the best documentation it's ever had. That's a low bar given where it started, but the quality is genuinely good — accurate, structured, readable. Something I'd be comfortable sharing with another developer.
More importantly: I actually kept up with it. Because the effort required to update docs dropped from "major task I'll do someday" to "10-minute review session," I did it. That's the real win.
If documentation debt is a real problem for you — and for most solo developers and hobbyists, it is — Scribe is worth trying. It's part of the Tier 3 Operations tier, priced at $29, installs in minutes, and produces something tangible the first day you use it. If you also want financial tracking, pair it with Ledger ($29) via the Operations Stack ($49) — both agents, better together.