How I stopped spending 2 hours/week maintaining docs infrastructure

Every week, our team spent about 2 hours on docs infrastructure. Not writing docs — maintaining the system that serves them. Rebuilding after a failed deploy. Fixing broken CI/CD pipelines. Updating dependencies in the docs framework. Debugging build errors that had nothing to do with the actual content. We were using Docusaurus. It's a great tool, but it's a full app — with a build step, a deploy pipeline, and all the maintenance that comes with it. One day I asked myself: why do we need a build step for markdown files? The Hidden Cost of Docs Infrastructure Here's what our docs workflow looked like: Write markdown in the repo Push to GitHub GitHub Actions triggers a build Docusaurus compiles the site Deploy to Vercel/Netlify Pray nothing breaks When it worked, it was fine. But every few weeks something would break: Node version mismatch in CI A dependency update that broke the build CSS conflicts after a theme update Build timeouts on larger doc sets Each incident cost 30-60 minutes