How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents

**Han Wang** (0:00)
Hey guys, here's your docs that are way better now on Mintlify. Take a look. And that's when I realized the beauty of having failed so many times, which was in failing so many times and building so many ideas that didn't work, when something did, there was no mistake in it.

**Hahnbee Lee** (0:21)
It's very important to solve one problem correctly. And even right now, as we're experimenting and launching new products, we're hyper-focused on getting one person who loves what we're building, as opposed to a thousand people who are going to just feel mad about it.

**Han Wang** (0:38)
It's still the small things that don't scale that really spark the customer love. And the thing that goes the extra mile, if you will, is how we think about things, right? If you go the extra mile in a way that people don't expect, you know, imagine.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:54)
For most of the Internet's history, documentation has been an afterthought, something you write after the product ships, something meant to explain what already exists. But what happens when the reader isn't human anymore? For decades, docs were written for people. They explained APIs, answered questions, and slowly drifted out of date as products evolved. That decay was accepted as normal because documentation was treated as reference material, not infrastructure. In the last few years, that assumption has broken. Coding agents support bots and internal AI tools now read documentation directly. Docs are no longer just explanatory, they're also operational input. When they're wrong or outdated, systems break. This creates attention. Documentation matters more than ever, but keeping it accurate has always been one of the hardest problems in software. Static docs don't survive fast moving products, especially in an agent-driven world. In this episode, we explain how documentation is changing, why static docs are failing, and what it would take to build documentation that stays reliable as software evolves. Our guests are Hahn Wang and Hahnbee Lee, co-founders of Mintlify, joined by a16z general partner Jennifer Li and a16z partner Yoko Li.

**Jennifer Li** (2:04)
I'll start the podcast with this question. Given you're at the front center of seeing how agent has impacted coding because you're building a documentation product that's serving all the developer tools, the most popular ones, how have you seen the transition from the starting point of building Mintlify to what a role of a coding agent plays now?

**Han Wang** (2:22)
I mean, it's so different now, right? I think, and it speaks a lot to even how much has changed in such a short amount of time, right? I remember when Hahnbee and I decided we kind of wanted to embark the journey of wanting to go build something that helps developers, right? The first thing that came to our mind, this was like to paint the picture, like early 24, late 23, early 24, we were just like, let's go build something that could impact developers, help their journey as kind of like the impetus for why we want to start a company and then landed on building like just better developer docs because we were like, let's go solve problems that we can relate to, right? As people who've been building our entire lives and careers, we're like, we know that there's so many bad docs out there. There's an audience we can relate to, it's a problem that we deeply understand and care about, let's just go build that. Then obviously, what changed from then till now was this tsunami of changing developer expectations, changing the way people build entirely. What initially started was just a very simple platform for people to build, maintain better docs, read for other humans, really started transition to being something for humans and AI. What eventually now it went from being an application to, it really feels like an infrastructure product. It's content that powers AI, it's content that trains support agents, coding agents, you name it.
I think witnessing that change firsthand is not only a testament to how much the world has changed, but being front and center of it and having a role in something that we find particularly meaningful.

**Yoko Li** (4:03)
Obviously, nowadays, even before we invested, we see Mintlify all the time. Every company we meet in the very earliest stage to enterprises, everyone is centralized on Mintlify. Was it always obvious to you, if you look back, what's a story that led up to this point?

**Han Wang** (4:21)
Yeah, a lot of pivots and a lot of failure along the way. By the way, in my opinion, too many people use us.

**Hahnbee Lee** (4:29)
No one's saying that.

**Han Wang** (4:32)
We need more variants in the world, that's what I think.