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A New ReadMe, Built to Work with AI

We're rolling out a new ReadMe, redesigned for writers looking to work more effectively with AI to create documentation that helps developers build with agents.

Justina NguyenHead of MarketingMay 7, 20264 min read

Today, we're rolling out a redesigned ReadMe, built around how docs get written and read in the AI era. Writers can collaborate with AI without giving up the final word, and the docs you ship work just as well for the people reading them as for the agents your customers are building with. We rebuilt our homepage to show how it all fits together. Write from our editor, your IDE, or the CLI. Your customers just see great docs.

Here's what you can start using today:

  • A completely redesigned admin experience, which puts everything you need to build and edit docs right where you expect them to be
  • A flexible, AI-native editor that lets you mix Markdown with MDX/JSX and keeps you as the final editor in the loop
  • A CLI tool that works with AI to lint your docs and keep your OpenAPI spec in sync
  • An AI Writer that watches your GitHub pull requests for code changes and suggests updates to your docs automatically

Redesigned Admin Interface

All our tools in a simple-to-use sidebar

About a year ago, we did a redesign where we combined the hubs (the outward-facing sites your customers see) and the dash (the admin panel used for editing), to make it easy to jump between edit and view mode. Most of the admin features lived in the bar at the top. Since then, we've added a lot: AI agent, branching, docs audit, branch reviews, MCP servers, and more. The thin top bar became too overloaded, and often-used features were hidden away.

So, we're launching a redesign. We moved everything into a single sidebar, which is where all the management features now live. We reorganized settings, too, so things should be easier to find and access.

There's also a full preview now! So, you can see exactly what your docs look like to your customers, without any admin UI.

We did a lot of user testing, and everyone has a much easier time navigating. That being said, we know we didn't get it perfect on the first try, so if you have any feedback please reach out!

New Editor

Markdown meets MDX with an inline AI

We rebuilt our editor from the ground up! While it mostly looks the same, it will feel a lot better. We switched the underlying editor engine (from Slate to Tiptap, for anyone curious). It's a much nicer experience, handles MDX better, and now the editor matches the output a lot closer than before.

It's also closely tied to our new rendering engine, MDX-ish. It's a combination of MDX and Markdown, so you won't have to remember pedantic MDX syntax anymore if you're writing code. You can learn more in our blog post, Introducing MDX-ish.

Lastly, we've brought AI right into the editor. Before, you could make changes to content from the AI sidebar. Now, if you highlight text, you can use AI to preview and apply the changes without leaving the editor.

Create branches

There are three ways to create a branch:

  1. Navigate to the versions and branches menu. Once there, you can create new branches from a version.
  2. While editing an individual guide, endpoint, etc., instead of clicking Save, you can click Save to Branch.
  3. If you're syncing with GitHub, branches created in GitHub will show up in ReadMe. And branches created in the ReadMe UI will automatically show up in GitHub!

Once your branch is created, you can start writing! Changes will not be live until you merge your branch into a public version.

Switching between branches

You can switch between branches at any time from the version picker in the top-left of the editor. Your draft on the current branch is saved automatically before you switch, so nothing is lost.

Branches are isolated from each other — edits made on one branch won't appear on another until they're merged. This makes it safe to draft major rewrites or experiment with structural changes without affecting your live docs.

BIS|
Edit with AI

For self-serve plans, the editor is available now as a one-click upgrade. Because it also changes the underlying rendering engine, we wanted to make sure you were in control. For enterprise, reach out to your CSM or support, and we can turn it on for you. We'll also manually go through all your docs to confirm everything looks great!

AI Writer

Sync GitHub code changes to your docs

Keeping docs in sync with code just got easier. When your team pushes code changes, ReadMe's AI Writer creates a branch with suggested doc updates for you to review and merge. Your docs stay current with product development without the manual chase.

readme-ai-writerBotcommented on May 7

Documentation Changes Added

Page
Section
Action
Preview
setting-up-custom-domain
Docs
Updated
Preview
View all changes in ReadMe

Actions

The ReadMe CLI tool

Write docs in your terminal... or let AI do it for you!

You've always been able to write docs in our WYSIWYG editor or your IDE. You can also write right from the terminal using BiDi Sync, and we wanted to make sure that was a delightful experience too.

We built a CLI tool which helps make sure you've formatted your docs properly. It checks for broken links, duplicate slugs, invalid frontmatter, and broken MDX components. It can automatically fix most issues, and for the harder ones you can use Claude or Codex to finish the job.

The ReadMe CLI v1.0.0
npx @readme/cli
~/projects/my-docs $ npx @readme/cli lint
2 errors and 19 warnings in 346 files
24 custom blocks · 18 custom pages · 151 docs · 10 recipes · 143 reference
docs/Getting Started/enterprise-guides.md
Invalid frontmatter: "titl" is not a valid property, did you mean "title"?
docs/Getting Started/quickstart.md
Broken link: "doc:initial-project-configuration" does not match any page
docs/AI/AskAI.md
Unknown property: "category" is not a known frontmatter field (use x-category for custom metadata)
docs/Getting Started/_order.yaml
Missing from _order.yaml: enterprise-guides
──────────────────────────────
Run npx @readme/cli lint --fix to automatically fix some of these.
💡 Tip: Set up GitHub Actions to lint your docs on every PR!
└ npx @readme/cli setup

The CLI tool complements your local AI workflows, too. It's built to be used by AI, so it can help Claude or Codex understand how to write ReadMe-formatted documentation from your computer.

Start Writing Docs From Anywhere

If you're reading this blog post, that means you've already seen our homepage got a glow-up! Check out our new sidebar, editor, CLI tool, MDX-ish renderer, and AI Writer, and let us know what you think!

Happy writing!


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