Gascity Docs

Writing Gas City docs

This is the house style for docs/ — Gas City's public Mintlify site. The goal is docs that motivate before they jargon, say the same thing the same way everywhere, show concepts as pictures and snippets instead of walls of prose, and never drift from the code. Apply it to any page you create, edit, or review.

The audience of docs/ is a user/operator of Gas City. Contributor-facing material lives in engdocs/ and AGENTS.md and follows different rules (it may describe the implementation literally). When this skill says "the docs," it means docs/.

1. The canonical model

Gas City is built from six primitives. This is the user-facing model; teach it consistently and link to it rather than re-explaining it.

The authoritative page is docs/getting-started/how-gas-city-works.md. Other pages link to it; they do not re-derive the whole model.

Relationship backbone (state it where it helps, don't repeat it everywhere): packs declare agents/formulas/orders → the local pack is the City → a Formula operates over a convoy of Beads, fanning work to Agents that execute in a Rig → an Order automates when a formula runs → Events fire so humans and agents can observe.

2. Required terminology

These are settled. Use the left column; never the right (except as noted).

molecule / wisp are the v1 materialization — an implementation detail, not a user concept. They may appear only as a parenthetical naming the v1 mechanism, never as a heading, a decision axis, or a list item the reader chooses among. The v1/v2 formula spec files are the one exception (they normatively define the v1 materialization).

No Gas Town design-philosophy jargon in docs/ prose: ZFC, NDI, GUPP, MEOW, "Bitter Lesson". Keep the plain principle, drop the acronym. (These live in AGENTS.md / engdocs/ for contributors.)

Role names: use neutral examples (planner, reviewer, worker) on generic pages. Keep the Gas Town role names (deacon, polecat, crew, witness, reaper) only on Gas-Town-specific pages (coming-from-gastown, gastown-*). mayor stays everywhere.

When you rename a concept across the corpus, see references/terminology.md for the prose-vs-literal discipline (rename the concept in prose; preserve literal program output, JSON fields, config keys, and generated files).

3. Content stance

• Docs are not the project's history. No code archaeology on user pages — no internal/* package paths, no "the X subsystem was removed in the Y migration", no "the former Z". That belongs in engdocs//AGENTS.md. Migration framing is allowed only on an explicit migration page (coming-from-gastown).
• Motivate before you mechanize. Lead a page with the problem it solves, then the solution, then the mechanics. Don't open on vocabulary.
• Lead with the value. Gas City's value is v2 orchestration — many agents, out of session — framed as a software factory that gets production quality at machine speed. Never frame orchestration as a "thin layer."
• One concrete image beats three abstract sentences. Where you assert a capability, show a tangible instance of it.

4. Information architecture

The nav sections are Getting Started, Tutorials, Guides, Troubleshooting, Reference (the contributor map lives in engdocs/contributors/docs-organization.md).

• Every section has an Overview page (frontmatter title: Overview) that introduces the section in a sentence or two and then lists every page beneath it with a one-line, accurate summary and a link. The home page (docs/index.mdx) is the Getting Started Overview.
• One page, one purpose. A page that tries to teach and specify does neither — split it and cross-link.
• The repository/codebase map belongs in the README, not in docs/.
• Concept material is unified on how-gas-city-works; don't reintroduce a separate "concepts" section.

5. Prose doctrine — cut words, sharpen points

Most bloat is information stored in the wrong medium. Move it to a cheaper carrier, then delete what isn't pulling weight. Every page must stand alone — a reader landing cold needs no previous page.

Convert (move load off prose):

• A relationship or sequence → a diagram (reuse an existing one or author a new one — see §6).
• A set of parallel options/fields/comparisons → a table.
• "you do X, which does Y" narration → an annotated CLI/TOML snippet (show the artifact, comment it).
• Edge cases and deep mechanics → an <Accordion>, or move them to a spec/reference page. Keep the 80% on the page.

Delete (the load was fake): throat-clearing openers ("In this section we'll…"), hedge chains ("generally / typically / in most cases"), restatement (said → explained → summarized: keep the sharpest one), narrating an artifact a snippet or table already shows, and adjectives standing in for evidence.

Write for the reader, not about the edit. No meta-commentary, no asides that only make sense relative to text you removed, and no negative "this is X, not Y — go read something else." Use a positive invitation instead ("If you'd like a step-by-step walkthrough, see the Tutorials").

Standalone, not sequential. Use a consistent example cast across pages (same city/rig/feature names; mayor is a fine recurring name), but never depend on reading order — give each page a one-line self-contained setup, and dedup the six-primitive model by linking to how-gas-city-works, not by re-explaining it.

When you're running a deliberate simplification pass over a page or a whole section — not just applying these moves ad hoc — follow references/simplification.md: the per-page loop (measure → convert/delete → verify), and the two guardrails that keep a trim honest — a loss-check (don't drop a fact that lives nowhere else) and a fact-check (don't let trimmed or rewritten prose drift from the code).

6. Emphasis and formatting

• Bold names a term, on first mention only — the thing the reader should anchor on. Italic marks a property or contrast (the *who/what/how* role words, *outside your session*). Keep it to ~1–2 marks per paragraph, never give the same phrase both treatments, and never re-emphasize a term already introduced. The six-primitive bullet list (one bold term + one italic role word each) is the model.
• No body # H1 — the frontmatter title is the H1. Use ##/### in the body.
• Mintlify markdown: root-relative links without the file extension (/tutorials/index), <Note>/<Tip>/<Accordion> sparingly, valid MDX.

7. Diagrams

The project standard is engdocs/design/excalidraw-diagrams.md — read it before authoring. In short: author the source, render with make diagrams-excalidraw (source .excalidraw + rendered .svg both get committed), use the shared pastel palette, and embed from a docs page as /diagrams/excalidraw-rendered/<name>.svg with descriptive alt text.

Two non-negotiables learned the hard way:

• Keep labels short and let them fit — a two-line "Name / role" beats a long sentence crammed in a box. After rendering, rasterize the SVG and look at it (text overflow and layout problems are invisible in a text diff).
• Prefer reusing an existing rendered diagram over authoring a new one.

8. Generated content is edited at its source

Never hand-edit a generated file. In docs/reference/ these are cli.md, config.md, and schema/* (emitted by cmd/genschema from Cobra Long: strings and Go struct doc comments), plus the OpenAPI spec and the dashboard's generated TS types. To change their wording, edit the Go source and regenerate (go run ./cmd/genschema), then commit source + regenerated output together. A freshness test (TestCLIDocsFreshness) fails if they drift.

9. Verify before you call it done

Run the gates in references/verification.md. The durable repo gates are make check-docs (nav↔file + local markdown links), make diagrams-excalidraw (if you touched diagrams), go run ./cmd/genschema (if you touched generated docs), and make dashboard-ci (if you touched internal/api/, the OpenAPI spec, or the dashboard — dashboard-check alone does not catch a stale generated client). Beyond the gates: every TOML fence must parse, every internal link and anchor must resolve, no page is orphaned from the nav, and no body H1 was introduced. Preview on the live site with make docs-dev (or ./mint.sh dev) at localhost:3000.

When you move or remove a page: add a Mintlify redirect in docs/docs.json from the old path, rewrite inbound links (including engdocs/ links that use the ../../docs/... form), and update any nav/IA references.

10. Review and commit discipline

• Author → the user reviews → commit only on explicit approval. Push nothing without a clear go-ahead. This matters most for diagrams and images, which can't be reviewed in a text diff — render them and show the user before committing.
• Group commits by audience for reviewability: contributor (AGENTS.md + engdocs/) separate from user docs (docs/).
• Docs-only commits hit a lightweight docsync pre-commit gate; a change touching Go source escalates to the full fast test suite, which can flake under load — if it does, confirm the change is doc/comment-only and the relevant gates pass, and disclose that in the commit message.