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Wire migrates from MkDocs. The migrate-mkdocs command converts your existing MkDocs Material site to Wire format, preserving frontmatter, nav structure, and content. What you gain: 91 build gates that catch broken links, outdated references, and structural decay before your users do.
In early 2026, markdown crossed from documentation format into infrastructure layer. Cloudflare launched Markdown for Agents in February 2026, a network-level feature that converts HTML to markdown on request. Their own measurement on a blog post showed conversion from 16,180 HTML tokens to 3,150 markdown tokens, an 80% reduction. That conversion overhead is the cost of not being markdown-native. Wire sites do not pay it.
The Problem with Developer Docs
Developer documentation decays faster than any other content type. APIs change quarterly. Libraries ship breaking changes. Your docs still reference v2.3 when v4.0 shipped six months ago. MkDocs builds whatever you give it: no quality gates, no freshness monitoring, no warning when half your code examples reference deprecated methods.
Pew Research (May 2024) found that 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, and 21% of government sites do the same. For developer documentation, where a broken link to an API reference or a stale code example costs an engineer hours, that figure is a baseline case for automated enforcement, not an edge case.
The audience problem compounds the decay problem. Mintlify's internal data (early 2026) puts AI agent traffic at nearly 50% of documentation site visits. A documentation site optimized only for human readers is now optimized for less than half its audience. Claude Code and OpenCode already send Accept: text/markdown headers in production requests. Sites publishing in HTML require a conversion layer. Sites publishing in markdown do not.
How Wire Fits
Wire adds an AI content layer on top of the static site generator. The build verification system runs 91 checks before every deploy. Broken internal links trigger BUILD REFUSED. Missing descriptions, orphan pages, and thin content are all caught before they reach users.
The news command, part of Wire's news intelligence pipeline, watches for updates to your dependencies, frameworks, and API providers. When a breaking change ships, Wire finds the announcement. The refine command integrates that news into affected documentation pages: your migration guide updates when the upstream library changes.
Wire also generates llms.txt automatically. Jeremy Howard (co-founder, Answer.AI and fast.ai) proposed the llms.txt standard on September 3, 2024, as a markdown file at a site's root giving LLMs structured, token-efficient access to documentation. By early 2026, Anthropic, Cursor, GitBook, and Mintlify have adopted it. Wire sites generate it without configuration.
The three-layer content quality enforcement handles the rest: prompt rules prevent mistakes at generation time, structural fixes apply on save, and automated audit detects issues across the full site.
Markdown as the Source of Truth
A GitHub engineer published a spec-driven development workflow in March 2026 where main.md and README.md serve as the sole source of truth, with GitHub Copilot compiling them into Go code. The file structure: main.md (spec), README.md (user docs), compile.prompt.md (build prompt), main.go (generated output). As the engineer noted: "Notice how the user-facing documentation from README.md is embedded in the specification. This keeps documentation and implementation in sync."
Microsoft formalized the same principle across its tooling. GitHub Copilot custom instructions via .github/copilot-instructions.md were formalized in January 2025, applying repo-scoped behavioral guidance across VS Code, Visual Studio, and GitHub.com, per the GitHub Changelog. Reusable .prompt.md templates stored in .github/prompts/ now work across VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains IDEs.
The distinction for Wire: GitHub Copilot uses markdown files as behavioral guidance for an AI assistant. Wire uses markdown files as the source for a production website with enforced quality gates. These are complementary. A team using .github/copilot-instructions.md to govern their AI assistant can use Wire to govern the documentation site those instructions help produce.
Setting Up a Documentation Site
Migration from MkDocs
python -m wire.migrate-mkdocs # Run from your mkdocs repo
This converts mkdocs.yml to wire.yml, preserves your nav, and moves content to Wire format.
wire.yml Structure
Developer docs need clear hierarchy. A working nav configuration:
nav:
- index.md
- Getting Started:
- Overview: getting-started/index.md
- Installation: getting-started/installation/index.md
- Quick Start: getting-started/quickstart/index.md
- API Reference:
- Overview: api/index.md
- Guides:
- Overview: guides/index.md
Style Guide for Technical Content
Write a _styleguide.md that enforces the patterns that prevent decay:
- Code examples in every section, not just prose descriptions
- Version numbers with dates, never "the latest version"
- Precise method signatures and parameter types
- Error messages and troubleshooting steps alongside the happy path
Components for Developer Docs
Use :::tabs for multi-language code examples (Python, JavaScript, Go). Use :::alert warning for deprecation notices and breaking changes. Use :::steps for tutorial walkthroughs. Wire renders fenced code blocks with copy buttons and syntax highlighting automatically.
What Wire Generates Without Configuration
Sitemap, RSS for changelog-style updates, JSON-LD, search_index.json for instant full-text search, llms.txt for AI agent consumption, table of contents, reading progress, code copy buttons, and responsive layout. No custom templates required.
Limitations
Wire does not support interactive API explorers, live code playgrounds, or versioned documentation (v1 and v2 side by side). For API explorers, pair with Swagger UI or Redoc. For versioning, use git branches and deploy separate Wire builds per version. Teams that also need internal documentation alongside public docs can run a separate knowledge base with the same pipeline. For product update pages, see the changelog pattern.
Platform Context
For teams evaluating Git-integrated documentation platforms alongside Wire, current pricing as of March 2026: Mintlify Pro at $250/month, Fern Team at $150/month, ReadMe Business at $349/month, GitBook Premium at $65/site/month plus $12/user/month, Redocly Pro at $10/seat/month. Read the Docs is free for open source. Source: Mintlify platform comparison, March 23, 2026. Wire's cost is hosting only.
Quick Start
Migrate your existing docs
Run `python -m wire.migrate-mkdocs` from your MkDocs project root. Review the generated `wire.yml` and adjust nav as needed.
Preview locally
Run `python -m wire.build --serve` to preview. Fix any BUILD REFUSED errors before proceeding.
Connect search data
Connect GSC and run `python -m wire.chief data` for search insights. This powers keyword-aware content updates.
Automate freshness monitoring
Set up the bot for automated news monitoring. When a dependency ships a breaking change, Wire finds the announcement and queues a `refine` pass on affected pages. See all Wire use cases for more patterns.