Tome I: The ReadMe Awakens
Chapter 1: The Pull Request Prophecy
It began, as most legends do, with a pull request.
Elian Page, junior Documentation Alchemist of the 7th Circle of Stack, had just finished linting a particularly ornery JSON schema when a cryptic PR appeared in the monastery’s main Git repository:
# TODO: Find the One Doc to rule them all.
No author. No files changed. Just a single line.
The other scribes ignored it. Ghost PRs were common after long sprint cycles. But Elian couldn’t look away. Something in the message felt deliberate—as if the commit itself had been handcrafted by an ancient version control being.
So he merged it.
And thus the quest began.
Chapter 2: Whitespace and Wrath
His first trial came quickly. The monastery’s linter-bot, Lintor the Clean, activated with a fury unseen since the Great Code Formatting War. Dozens of violations streamed across Elian’s terminal:
- đźš« Trailing whitespace
- đźš« Inconsistent line endings
- đźš« Unescaped underscores in Markdown
Elian faced them all. With .editorconfig in hand and a trembling cursor, he cleaned, aligned, and committed. Lintor, satisfied, granted him the Scroll of Style Guide and a single approving log entry:
[âś“] Formatting acceptable.
Chapter 3: The Scribe’s Linting Trial
Under the eye of the Grand Archivist, Elian undertook the sacred rite of markdownlint. Each failure was a lesson:
- Headers must not increment by more than one level at a time
- Lists must be properly indented
- Code blocks require triple backticks
With each correction, Elian learned to see not just words, but structure—order from chaos. For the first time, he understood: linting was not punishment. It was discipline.
Chapter 4: README or Die Trying
Charged with creating a README for the abandoned Project Obsidian, Elian opened the project directory. Nothing but a lonely .env, an expired package-lock.json, and a half-formed index.php.
He began:
# Project Obsidian
> A forgotten thing, built long ago, whose purpose has been lost to time.
He documented what he could reverse-engineer. The setup instructions were arcane. The dependencies deprecated. But when he pushed the README, something happened: a glowing checkmark appeared in the UI. The project’s CI pipeline, dormant for years, ran and passed.
Something was waking up.
Chapter 5: Into the Legacy Swamp
To continue his journey, Elian entered the Legacy Swamp, a vast repo of undocumented, uncommented, pre-Git projects.
Here, global.js files lived without purpose. Functions nested within functions like dark Russian dolls. Magic numbers roamed free.
He created doc/ folders. He ran jsdoc. He annotated with patience and pity. For every piece of documentation written, the fog lifted a little more.
Chapter 6: Tabs vs Spaces: The Ancient War
In the depths of the swamp, Elian came across two rival tribes: the Tabulites and the Spacionians. Their war had split entire codebases. Files alternated between formats, defying diffs and merging sanity.
Elian invoked the Formatter of Unity (prettier --write .), and forced a style unification. The tribes wept, but peace was restored.
He emerged from the swamp carrying a single, sacred .editorconfig file.
Chapter 7: The Markdown Monastery
Elian sought sanctuary at the Markdown Monastery, where monks wrote prose and code in perfect harmony.
Here he studied:
- The proper use of
#for hierarchy - The subtle art of fenced code blocks
- How to use emphasis without abusing it
He copied ancient .md scrolls. He debated list styles. He chanted the CommonMark specification before dawn.
He was now a true initiator of the Docs-as-Code discipline.
Chapter 8: Table of Contents, Table of Truth
In a hidden directory, Elian discovered the Table of Contents—not a file, but a sentient directory tree. It restructured itself as he documented subfolders, revealing hidden files only when referenced in a SUMMARY.md.
He came to understand that hierarchy was narrative. That structure told the story.
When he completed the ToC, it whispered a single file path:
/docs/The_Inline_Comment_Oracle.md
Chapter 9: The Inline Comment Oracle
Deep in the codebase, Elian found her: a block of comments so dense, so verbose, that they had gained sentience.
The Oracle spoke:
// If you’ve reached this line, you’ve gone too far.
// The bug lies above. Trust the stack trace.
Through riddles and references to deprecated APIs, the Oracle taught Elian the art of contextual documentation—knowing what to say, and when to shut up.
Chapter 10: Escape from NullPointer Castle
As Elian pushed deeper, he encountered NullPointer Castle, an ancient Jenkinsfile with 487 lines and no comments.
Each pipeline step was a riddle. Each failure, a trap.
With newly acquired wisdom, he refactored the pipeline, parameterized the jobs, and—most importantly—documented why each decision had been made.
He escaped just as a recursive job threatened to loop eternally.
At the end of Tome I, Elian had not found the Perfect Documentation—but he had found its essence:
- Clarity over cleverness
- Structure over sprawl
- Empathy over ego
The path was long. But with every commit, he grew closer to the One Doc to rule them all.
“A documented line is a line remembered. A forgotten function is a future bug.”
Tome II: The Conflict of Merge* awaits...