SpecMD — What if Your Documentation Was Your Code?

Source: Dev.to

The Problem

One of the biggest pain points in software development is keeping documentation and code in sync.

Documentation is often:

• outdated
• ignored
• inconsistent with the actual code
• hard to maintain
• rarely trusted

Meanwhile, the code is:

• the source of truth
• reliable
• rarely immediately understandable

These two worlds don’t have to be separate.

The SpecMD Approach

SpecMD is an approach where documentation is written in Markdown, and that Markdown becomes the source of truth for how the software should behave.

Core Idea

1. Write the intended behavior and rules in plain text.
2. That text becomes executable code.
3. The code validates that the implementation matches the document.

If documentation and implementation diverge:

• The test fails.
• The inconsistency is visible immediately.

How It Works

• A document line might say: “The user’s email address must be unique in the system.”
• That sentence becomes executable logic.
• If the implementation allows duplicates, the document surfaces the error.

Documentation thus becomes enforcement.

Benefits

SpecMD can help teams that:

• Build critical systems.
• Manage large or distributed codebases.
• Onboard new developers often.
• Maintain complex business rules.
• Need reliable documentation trust.
• Want clarity and traceability.

If you’ve suffered from stale documentation, this will resonate.

Further Reading

• Full write‑up:
• GitHub Open Research Project:

Discussion

• Should documentation play a more active role in how we build software?
• Can description become execution?

Drop your thoughts — I’d love to hear perspectives from other developers who’ve battled with this problem.