1b: the docs are a pointless ritual that sometimes ends up taking multiple times longer than implementing, and if too many people see it they start asking thing

1b: the docs are a pointless ritual that sometimes ends up taking multiple times longer than implementing, and if too many people see it they start asking things like "what are your KPIs" and "when are your deliverables synergized" and "have you written the oncall runbooks yet? what's the protocol spec for that?" and "what's your projected uplift". if it's less than 5 pages of text, you're dinged on perf because your documents aren't detailed enough. for projects like "we should add a small in-memory cache to this slow area". so you're best off writing a small one that you do your best to hide, and make a few fancy ones per season with graphs and absurd will-never-be-implemented details for the higher-ups to be distracted by.