Building a docs platform for agents

Since announcing Stainless Docs early access in November, we’ve worked with Anthropic, Cloudflare, Letta, OpenAI and dozens of other early access partners to build the next generation of their docs sites on Stainless.

As we built with these partners, it became clear that impact of AI agents on docs isn’t speculative, it’s already here.

Across the board, sites are seeing more traffic than ever, with agents quickly becoming a primary consumer of documentation. And agents aren’t just consuming docs, they’re building the sites and writing the content.

As we enter public beta, I wanted to share a bit more on what the industry’s most forward looking companies are doing with their docs and how we’ve built Stainless Docs Platform to support them.

Agents are your audience

Throughout our early access program, we’ve seen agent and crawler traffic represent an ever increasing amount of docs site traffic.

We expected this to happen and aimed to build Stainless Docs from the ground up to support agents as first-class consumers.

Our first step to accomplish this was straightforward in theory but non-trivial to pull off in practice: we built a native markdown renderer for API reference content. Instead of trying to convert HTML pages to markdown after the fact, we generate Markdown and HTML independently of each other, with the type information from SDKs and APIs as the source of truth for each.

Most other “AI-native” work we’ve done is built on top of this. We now make the markdown content of every page accessible via the Accept header or by adding /index.md to any URL.

And our new built-in AI assistant can reference that same markdown representation of your content.

While building a first-class markdown renderer was very AI-specific, much of the other work to support agents has been surprisingly applicable to both humans and AI.

SDK docs require less context switching and guess work vs. language agnostic API references. Great written guides enable quicker integrations. SSR and edge-rendering means pages load faster and sites are more reliable.

We’re continuing to explore new AI-specific optimizations, but we’re particularly excited by work that benefits agents and people.

The bar for polish and functionality is rising

Until very recently, most documentation products and frameworks were designed to quickly generate sites that looked pretty good and worked pretty well in the general case. Customization was limited and that was fine, since few teams would actually spend the engineering effort to make their docs sites closely match their brands or add functionality unique to their products.

When we started building Docs Platform, we took a bet that coding agents would change this calculus for our customers. With access to a good coding agent, why not ask it to go the extra mile and make your docs site feel like it's really yours? The Stainless Docs framework represents your content, theming, components, and configuration as code, meaning it’s easy for agents to tweak any aspect of your site.

Since our early access launch in November, we’ve been consistently delighted by how well this bet has paid off.

Anthropic used Claude Code to integrate Stainless Docs seamlessly into their existing Next.js Claude Platform site. Letta started with a blank Stainless Docs site, and used Letta Code to make it feel entirely theirs. And OpenAI used Codex to bring Stainless Docs into a newly unified Astro-based site.

While their individual requirements differed, each chose to start with the strong foundation provided by Stainless Docs and relied heavily on their coding agents to apply configuration and customization.

While these example cases are all AI companies who are building at the frontier, coding agents and the Stainless Docs building blocks are available to everyone. If you’re building or refreshing a docs site in 2026, we feel confident saying “code first” is an easy bet to make.

Barriers to entry are lowering

During our early access program, we spun up dozens of demo sites for prospective users. Initially, because Stainless Docs is built to be used by developers, creating these demo sites was bottlenecked on our Docs Platform engineering team.

Recently, though, several of our teammates like Sam and Miheer on the GTM team or CJ on Developer Relations started using coding agents to build and customize sites, often without ever talking to engineering. While this was a huge help for us on the engineering team, it was also surprisingly fun for them.

When we spoke to our early access customers, they shared similar anecdotes.

Previously, “just” cloning a git repo, editing a Markdown file and running a preview server was sufficiently daunting for many. As a result, we’ve historically leaned heavily into tools like custom frontend UIs, content management systems, and internal tool builders to empower our less technical teammates. We did some of this with Docs Platform and, candidly, we anticipated doing much more.

While there may still be some value in WYSIWYG content editors or site builders paired with bespoke internal tools – the breakneck progress in AI models and tooling has meant that anyone can now become fluent in the more powerful technologies which have traditionally been the exclusive domain of software engineers.

We’ll continue to build functionality that makes authoring content on Stainless Docs more accessible, but in the meantime, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how democratized code-first tooling has become.

What you can do

Since I’m writing this on company time, I should (and will!) tell you to choose Stainless Docs to power your documentation - it’s the best! It’s a great citizen in a world with powerful coding agents precisely because it is, at its core, a dev tool.

Regardless of whether you adopt any particular product, framework, or protocol – it’s malpractice to ignore the compounding benefits accruing to teams that build for developers, and by extension, agents first.