Writing Technical Documents That People Actually Read

Every senior developer I know has a story about a document that changed everything. A well-written RFC that convinced leadership to rebuild the entire authentication system. A tech spec that aligned five teams who had been arguing for months. An ADR that saved the next developer from making a catastrophic mistake.

They also have stories about documents nobody read. Fifty page specifications that gathered dust while developers built something completely different. Proposals that died in committee because they failed to address the right concerns. Architecture decisions that were documented after the fact and ignored forever after.

The difference between these outcomes is not the importance of the content. It is the skill of the writer.

Writing technical documents is the most underleveraged skill in software development. It is rarely taught, almost never practiced deliberately, and frequently dismissed as bureaucratic overhead. Yet it is the single most reliable predictor of whether a developer will advance beyond mid-level into senior, staff, and leadership positions.

AI can generate code in seconds. It cannot write an RFC that persuades five skeptical teams to change their architecture. It cannot produce an ADR that captures the nuanced reasoning behind a decision made under uncertainty. It cannot draft a tech spec that anticipates the questions stakeholders will ask before they ask them. These tasks require judgment, context, and understanding of human dynamics that no language model possesses.

This article will teach you how to write technical documents that people actually read, documents that drive decisions, align teams, and advance your career.

Why Technical Writing Matters More Than Technical Skill

Let me make a claim that will sound controversial until you think about it carefully. After a certain level of competence, your writing determines your career trajectory more than your coding.

A mid-level developer who writes brilliant code but cannot communicate it will remain a mid-level developer. A mid-level developer who writes adequate code but can clearly articulate technical ideas, trade-offs, and recommendations will become a senior developer. This pattern holds so consistently that you can almost predict career outcomes by reading someone's documents.

The reason is simple. Code solves problems for computers. Documents solve problems for humans. And the higher you advance in any organization, the more your job involves solving human problems rather than computer problems.

When you propose a new architecture, you are not really proposing code. You are proposing that dozens of people change how they work. You are asking teams to invest time learning something new. You are asking leadership to allocate resources. You are asking your future self and future colleagues to maintain something for years. The technical implementation is the easy part. The hard part is getting everyone aligned on why this approach is better than the alternatives.

Documents are how that alignment happens. They are how decisions get made, how context gets preserved, and how organizations maintain coherence as they grow. The developers who can write these documents effectively become the developers who shape the direction of their teams and companies.

This is why, in discussions about what separates senior developers from everyone else, technical writing consistently appears as a distinguishing factor. Not because companies explicitly hire for it, but because the developers who have it naturally end up in positions of greater responsibility and influence.

The Three Documents Every Developer Should Master

Not all technical documents are created equal. Some are bureaucratic requirements that serve compliance purposes. Others are living artifacts that shape how work actually gets done. The three document types that matter most for JavaScript developers are the RFC, the ADR, and the Tech Spec.

The RFC (Request for Comments) is a proposal for significant change. It describes a problem, proposes a solution, considers alternatives, and invites feedback. RFCs are used when you want to change something that affects multiple teams or has long-term implications. They are persuasion documents. Their purpose is to build consensus around a course of action.

The ADR (Architecture Decision Record) is a record of a decision already made. It documents what was decided, why it was decided, what alternatives were considered, and what the consequences are expected to be. ADRs are historical documents. Their purpose is to help future developers understand why the system is the way it is.

The Tech Spec is a description of how to build something. It defines requirements, describes the approach, identifies edge cases, and provides enough detail for implementation to proceed. Tech specs are coordination documents. Their purpose is to align everyone on what will be built before the building starts.

Each document type has different goals, different audiences, and different structures. Confusing them leads to documents that serve no purpose well.

How to Write an RFC That Actually Gets Approved

An RFC lives or dies based on how well it addresses the concerns of its readers. Most developers who write RFCs focus on explaining their proposed solution. This is backwards. The most important part of an RFC is everything that comes before the solution.

Start With the Problem, Not the Solution

Your readers need to feel the pain of the problem before they will be receptive to your solution. If they do not agree that the problem is worth solving, nothing else in your document matters.

Describe the problem concretely. Not "Our authentication system has issues" but "Users are reporting 47 failed login attempts per day that succeed on retry, costing approximately 12 support tickets weekly and an estimated $2,400 in monthly support costs." Concrete problems get attention. Abstract problems get ignored.

Quantify the impact whenever possible. Numbers make problems real. "This is slow" is forgettable. "P95 latency is 3.2 seconds, causing a 23% abandonment rate on the checkout page" is actionable.

Explain why the problem is getting worse or why now is the right time to address it. Problems that will solve themselves or stay constant are lower priority than problems that are growing. If traffic patterns suggest the issue will affect twice as many users next quarter, say so.

Present Alternatives Before Your Recommendation

This is the most commonly skipped section and the most important one for getting approval. If you only present your preferred solution, readers will generate their own alternatives and ask why you did not consider them. This derails the discussion and makes you look like you did not think it through.

Present at least three alternatives, including the option of doing nothing. For each alternative, explain what it would involve, what its advantages are, and what its disadvantages are. Be fair to options you do not prefer. If you strawman the alternatives, readers will notice and trust you less.

After presenting alternatives, explain why you recommend one over the others. This is where you reveal your values and priorities. "I recommend Option B because it prioritizes short-term development speed over long-term flexibility. Given that we plan to revisit this system in Q3 regardless, I believe this tradeoff is appropriate."

Address Risks and Mitigations Explicitly

Every significant change carries risks. Pretending risks do not exist does not make them go away. It makes you look naive or dishonest.

Name the risks openly. "This approach requires migrating 12 million user records. If the migration fails mid-way, we could have users in inconsistent states." Then explain how you plan to mitigate them. "We will implement the migration as a series of idempotent batch jobs with rollback capability, testing on a replica dataset before running against production."

Acknowledging risks builds trust. It shows that you have thought carefully about what could go wrong rather than just imagining the happy path.

End With Clear Next Steps

An RFC without next steps is a discussion document. It might generate interesting conversation, but it will not drive action.

Specify exactly what you are asking for. "I am requesting approval to proceed with Option B. If approved, I will create detailed implementation tickets by Friday and begin work in the following sprint." This makes it easy for decision-makers to say yes.

If you need feedback on specific aspects, ask for it explicitly. "I am particularly uncertain about the caching strategy in Section 4. Feedback from the Platform team on whether this approach aligns with their roadmap would be valuable."

How to Write ADRs That Future Developers Will Thank You For

ADRs are love letters to the future. They answer the question that every developer has asked while staring at confusing code: "Why the hell did anyone think this was a good idea?"

The answer is usually that it was a good idea given the context at the time. But the context is invisible. The deadline pressure, the team composition, the technical constraints, the business requirements that later changed. All of this evaporates, leaving only the code, which looks inexplicable without the context.

ADRs preserve that context. They turn "this is terrible" into "this made sense because X, Y, and Z, and here is what would need to change for us to revisit it."

The Four Essential Sections

A good ADR has four sections, no more and no less.

Status indicates whether this decision is proposed, accepted, deprecated, or superseded. This tells the reader whether the document reflects current reality.

Context describes the situation that required a decision. What were the constraints? What were the requirements? What was the state of the system and the team? Write this as if explaining to a new team member who joined two years later and has no idea what things were like back then.

Decision states what was decided. Be specific and concrete. Not "We decided to use a better caching strategy" but "We decided to implement a write-through cache using Redis with a 15-minute TTL for user session data."

Consequences describes what happened or will happen as a result of this decision. What became easier? What became harder? What risks did we accept? What did we explicitly not do?

Write ADRs When Decisions Are Made, Not After

The biggest mistake with ADRs is writing them retrospectively. Two months after a decision, you have forgotten the alternatives you considered, the concerns that were raised, and the reasoning that led to your choice. The ADR becomes a rationalization rather than a record.

Write the ADR as part of the decision-making process. Use it to structure your thinking. Share the draft with colleagues to get feedback on the decision itself, not just on the documentation of it.

Some teams write ADRs before implementation and update them afterward with what actually happened versus what was expected. This creates a valuable feedback loop for improving future decisions.

Keep ADRs Short and Focused

An ADR should be readable in under five minutes. If your ADR is longer than two pages, you are probably documenting multiple decisions or including too much background.

Each ADR should cover one decision. If a project involved ten decisions, write ten short ADRs rather than one long document. This makes it easier to find relevant information later and easier to update individual decisions without touching the whole document.

How to Write Tech Specs That Prevent Disasters

A tech spec is a contract between the person planning the work and the person doing the work. Sometimes these are the same person, but even then, the spec serves a purpose. It forces you to think through the implementation before you start coding, when changing direction is cheap rather than expensive.

The best tech specs I have read share a common quality. They anticipate questions. They address the things that someone implementing the spec would wonder about before that person has to ask.

Begin With Goals and Non-Goals

Scope creep kills projects. Tech specs prevent scope creep by explicitly stating what is in scope and what is not.

Goals describe what this project will accomplish. "This project will implement social login via Google OAuth, allowing users to create accounts and log in without creating a password."

Non-goals describe what this project will explicitly not do, even though someone might reasonably expect it. "This project will not implement OAuth for other providers such as Facebook, Apple, or GitHub. Those are planned for a subsequent phase." Non-goals prevent the spec from growing during implementation as people think of related features.

Describe the User Experience Before the Technical Design

Start with what users will see and do, not with how the system will work internally. This keeps the focus on outcomes rather than implementation details.

Walk through the user flow step by step. "The user clicks 'Sign in with Google.' A popup appears requesting permission. After the user grants permission, the popup closes and the user is logged in. If the user's email is already associated with a password account, they are prompted to link the accounts."

This concrete description reveals edge cases that pure technical design would miss. What happens if the popup is blocked? What if the user denies permission? What if they close the popup without completing the flow?

Be Specific About Edge Cases

Edge cases are where most bugs live. A tech spec that says "handle errors appropriately" provides no value. A tech spec that enumerates the specific errors that can occur and how each should be handled prevents entire categories of bugs.

Think through everything that can go wrong. Network failures. Invalid data. Race conditions. Permissions issues. Upstream service outages. For each failure mode, describe what the system should do. This is tedious but essential. An hour spent thinking through edge cases in a document saves days of debugging in production.

Include a Testing Strategy

A spec without a testing strategy leaves quality to chance. Describe how you will verify that the implementation is correct.

What unit tests will you write? What integration tests? What manual testing is required before release? What monitoring will tell you if something goes wrong after release?

The testing strategy often reveals gaps in the technical design. If you cannot figure out how to test something, that is a sign the design needs work.

The Politics of Technical Documents

Technical documents are not purely technical. They exist within organizations that have power dynamics, competing priorities, and limited attention. Understanding these dynamics is essential to writing documents that achieve their goals.

Know Your Audience

Different readers care about different things. Engineers want to know how something will work and how it will affect their systems. Managers want to know the timeline, the risks, and the resource requirements. Executives want to know the business impact and how this aligns with strategic priorities.

A document that speaks only to one audience will fail to convince the others. This does not mean including everything for everyone, which creates bloated documents nobody reads. It means structuring your document so different readers can find what they need.

Summaries at the top for executives. Technical details in the body for engineers. Risk assessments and timelines for managers. Many successful RFCs have an explicit "TL;DR for leadership" section at the very top.

Socialize Before You Submit

Surprising people with significant proposals in formal review is a recipe for rejection. Decision-makers do not like being caught off guard. They do not like feeling pressured to respond immediately to something complex.

Before submitting your RFC for formal review, share it informally with key stakeholders. Ask for their concerns. Incorporate their feedback. By the time the document goes to formal review, the people whose approval you need should already be aligned. The formal review becomes a confirmation rather than a negotiation.

This informal socialization is where most of the actual decision-making happens. The formal process ratifies what was already decided in hallway conversations and one-on-ones.

Handle Disagreement Professionally

Sometimes people will disagree with your proposal. This is not failure. This is the system working correctly. Documents exist to surface disagreement so it can be resolved, not to rubber-stamp predetermined conclusions.

When someone raises a concern, resist the urge to defend your position immediately. Ask questions to understand their concern fully. Often, concerns that sound like blockers turn out to be addressable with minor modifications.

If the disagreement is fundamental, do not try to win through force of argument. Escalate to whoever can make the decision, presenting both perspectives fairly. Being seen as someone who handles disagreement professionally builds long-term credibility even when you do not get your way in the short term.

Why AI Cannot Replace Technical Writing

The recent shift in how developers work has made technical writing more valuable, not less. AI tools can generate code faster than ever before, but they cannot generate the documents that determine what code should be written and why.

A recent Anthropic study found that AI functions well as a collaborator but poorly as a replacement for human judgment. Technical documents are pure judgment. They require understanding organizational context, reading political dynamics, anticipating human concerns, and making trade-offs between competing values. No AI can do this because no AI understands your organization, your stakeholders, or your constraints.

Forbes recently described the shift in developer roles as moving "from coding to orchestration and governance." Technical documents are the primary tool of orchestration and governance. They are how developers coordinate work across teams, preserve knowledge across time, and make decisions that affect entire systems.

If anything, AI-accelerated development makes technical writing more important. When code can be generated quickly, the bottleneck shifts to deciding what code to generate. That decision happens in documents.

The developers who can write compelling RFCs, clear ADRs, and thorough tech specs will become more valuable as AI handles more of the routine implementation work. This is one of the skills that separates developers who thrive in the AI era from those who struggle, as we explored in our guide on how to be in the 60% of developers that AI will not replace.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Having read thousands of technical documents over the years, I have noticed patterns in what goes wrong. Here are the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Writing for Yourself Instead of Your Reader

The most common mistake is writing a document that makes sense to you, the person who already understands the problem and solution deeply. You skip context that seems obvious. You use shorthand that your reader does not share. You organize information in the order you thought of it rather than the order your reader needs to receive it.

Before you finalize any document, read it from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about your project. Better yet, have someone unfamiliar with your work read it and tell you where they got confused. The confusion points are where your document needs work.

Burying the Lead

Many technical documents save the recommendation for the end, after pages of background and analysis. This structure made sense for academic papers where the reader is expected to follow your reasoning to its conclusion. It does not work for professional documents where the reader has thirty seconds to decide whether to keep reading.

State your recommendation immediately, ideally in the first paragraph. Then provide the supporting material. Readers who agree with your recommendation can skim the rest. Readers who disagree know immediately what they are disagreeing with and can focus on the relevant sections.

Including Everything You Know

Comprehensive documents are not good documents. They are unread documents. The goal is not to demonstrate how much you know. The goal is to communicate what your reader needs to know.

Every sentence should serve a purpose. If a section does not help your reader understand the problem, evaluate your proposal, or make a decision, delete it. Err on the side of brevity. You can always provide more detail if asked.

Neglecting Visual Communication

Walls of text are hard to read. Diagrams, tables, and code examples break up the text and often communicate more efficiently than prose.

A diagram of your proposed architecture communicates in seconds what might take paragraphs to explain in words. A table comparing alternatives makes trade-offs immediately visible. A code example shows exactly what you mean in a way that descriptions cannot.

You do not need to be a designer to create useful visuals. Simple boxes and arrows drawn in any diagramming tool are sufficient. The goal is clarity, not beauty.

Failing to Maintain Documents

A document that does not reflect reality is worse than no document at all. It actively misleads readers.

When decisions change, update the relevant ADRs. When implementation reveals that the tech spec was wrong, update the tech spec or write a new one. When circumstances invalidate an RFC, mark it as deprecated.

Some teams review their document repositories quarterly, archiving documents that are no longer relevant and flagging documents that need updates. This maintenance is not glamorous, but it keeps the documentation useful.

Building Your Technical Writing Skills

Technical writing improves with practice, just like coding. Here are ways to deliberately develop this skill.

Read good documents. Find the best technical writers in your organization and read their documents carefully. Notice how they structure arguments. Notice what they include and what they leave out. Notice how they handle disagreement and uncertainty. Then imitate what works.

Write even when it is not required. Most organizations have documents that should exist but do not. That architecture decision everyone knows about but nobody wrote down. That system that nobody understands because the original authors left. Write those documents, even if nobody asked you to. The practice is valuable, and the documents might be too.

Seek feedback actively. After your documents go through review, ask reviewers what could be better. Not just whether the document is acceptable, but how it could be improved. Most people will give you useful feedback if you ask for it sincerely.

Study writing outside of software. The best technical writers I know read widely. Business writing, journalism, academic papers in other fields. Good writing shares principles across domains. Exposure to writing outside your field expands your toolkit.

The Career Impact of Technical Writing

I want to end with a concrete claim. If you invest six months in deliberately improving your technical writing, you will advance your career more than if you spent those six months on any other single skill.

This is because technical writing is rare. Most developers are adequate coders. Few are good writers. Being a good writer in a field full of adequate writers creates differentiation that is immediately visible to anyone who reads your documents.

It is also because technical writing creates leverage. A single well-written RFC can change the direction of a project involving dozens of people. A clear tech spec can prevent weeks of wasted effort. An ADR can save future developers hours of reverse-engineering. The impact of good technical writing scales in a way that individual coding does not.

And it is because technical writing demonstrates the qualities that get people promoted. The ability to think clearly about complex problems. The ability to communicate across organizational boundaries. The ability to drive decisions rather than just implement them. These are the qualities of senior engineers, staff engineers, and engineering leaders.

The documents you write are the most visible evidence of your thinking. Make them good.