Show HN: Treedocs: Documentation that automatically checks for staleness

A new tool called Treedocs landed on Hacker News promising to solve one of coding’s least glamorous headaches: figuring out what all the folders and files in a project actually do. In plain English, it creates a living map of a codebase, marks missing or outdated notes in red, and can even stop people from committing changes if the documentation has drifted out of date. It’s basically a house map for messy digital mansions — and the crowd was immediately split between “finally!” and “wait, why is this already weird?”

The biggest drama wasn’t even the tool at first — it was the thread itself. One commenter was baffled that the creator’s post got flagged, asking why a perfectly normal product demo was suddenly “dead.” That instantly gave the launch a faint free-speech-on-the-forum subplot. Meanwhile, another user delivered the classic buzzkill in five words: great idea, shame it’s Mac-only. For plenty of readers, that was the real scandal. If your shiny organizer only works on one kind of computer, is it a breakthrough or a gated party?

Still, the fans came in hot. One person praised the project’s “progressive disclosure” style — basically, revealing information step by step instead of dumping everything at once — and declared that bots love a good table of contents. Another jumped in with peak internet energy: “I made something similar too,” linking their own rival-ish tool for AI-assisted file summaries. So yes, Treedocs launched as a tidy documentation helper, but the comments turned it into a full-on mini-drama about platform lock-in, moderation mysteries, and whether AI needs cliff notes for your code.