When Your Documentation Manages Itself: mdship and AI-Assisted Markdown

If you write technical documentation in markdown, you already know the tension: some parts of your document are hand-written prose, while others — a table of contents, an included code snippet, a rendered diagram — are generated from somewhere else. How you handle that boundary says a lot about your workflow.

Most documentation toolchains resolve it the same way preprocessors like PET or Jamal do: separate the source from the output. You maintain a template file, run a build step, and get a rendered document as the result. Clean, predictable, and easy to reason about — but it adds a build step, and the output file is not the thing you actually edit or share.