Detection of Outdated Descriptions
Developer documentation typically includes a description in each file. This descriptions can become outdated, leading to confusion and incorrect information. To prevent this, you can automate the detection of outdated descriptions in your documentation using GenAIScript.
Markdown and frontmatter
Many documentation systems use the markdown format to write documentation and a ‘frontmatter’ header to store metadata. Here’s an example of a markdown file with frontmatter:
The goal is to create a script that detects when the description
field in the frontmatter is outdated.
The script
GenAIScript is meant to run on files and provides a special variable env.files
that contains the list of files to be analyzed. You can use this variable to include the files in the context using the def function. We limit each file to 2000 tokens to avoid exploding the content on large files.
The next step is to give a task to the script. In this case to check that the content and description
field in the frontmatter match.
Finally, we leverage the built-in diagnostics generation feature to create an error for each outdated description.
Running in Visual Studio Code
Once you save this script in your workspace, you will be able to execute it on a file or a folder through the context menu by selecting Run GenAIScript….
Automation
You can automatically run this tool on your documentation files to identify outdated descriptions using the cli.
This script can be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline to automate the detection process.