January 30, 2026
Help pages with superpowers
Building docs like a product
App‑like help pages spark a “copy MDN” vs “build your own” showdown
TLDR: Scour’s docs now act like the product itself, with live examples like a built‑in Hacker News search and in-doc settings. Commenters are split between “just copy MDN” and “this is Swagger for everything,” while many cheer that tying docs to real code keeps instructions fresh and useful.
Scour just turned its help pages into a mini app, and the internet has thoughts. The docs don’t just tell you what Scour does—they let you do it. There’s a live search that digs up buried posts from Hacker News, interactive guides for Reddit, Substack, and arXiv, and even switches you can flip right inside the docs (yes, you can hide paywalled content without leaving the page). It’s “show, don’t tell,” all the way down.
Cue the comment cage match. One camp shouted, “this looks like Swagger”—the interactive manuals developers use—while another rolled their eyes and said, “Just copy MDN, the gold standard.” The “build vs borrow” drama is real. Meanwhile, a dev on the thread popped in with a friendly “ask me anything,” which only threw more gasoline on the excitement.
The most viral praise? A commenter cheering that if the docs use the same components as the app, they’ll stop going stale the moment the product changes. Another fan applauded the “no dead links” push like it was a public service announcement. And in a relatable twist, one user confessed the true boss fight isn’t writing docs—it’s getting teams to agree on process. TL;DR: flashy, functional docs have the crowd buzzing, and the memes write themselves.
Key Points
- •Scour’s docs embed interactive product elements instead of static manuals.
- •A Hacker News guide includes a live search for posts not on the front page.
- •Guides for Reddit, Substack, and arXiv allow searching and subscribing directly from the docs.
- •Settings (e.g., hide paywalled content) can be changed within the documentation pages.
- •Axum and axum-extra’s TypedPath are used in Rust to define typed routes and avoid broken links.