Why your docs go stale after every merge

Every team has stale docs. The usual explanation is that engineers are lazy about documentation — but that's not really it. Docs go stale because the moment a change ships is exactly the moment nobody is thinking about the docs.

Drift is a process problem, not a discipline problem

A PR merges. The author moves to the next ticket. The doc that described the old behavior is in another repo, another tool, or another person's head. Nothing in the workflow connects the change to the document it just invalidated, so the drift accumulates silently until someone — often support — hits it.

Catch it where the change happens

The fix is to surface doc impact at the point of merge, automatically. When a pull request lands, syncTrace flags which docs the change likely made stale and suggests the update — alongside a plain-language summary of what shipped. The drift becomes visible while the change is still fresh, instead of weeks later.