Nobody reads the Monopoly rules

Monopoly has an official rulebook. Nobody reads it.

Everyone learned from their family: land on Free Parking, collect the cash. That rule doesn't exist. Nobody noticed for fifty years.

Documentation works the same way.

Managers write a long doc to cover every case, to keep legal comfortable.

Nobody reads it.

Users (employees) write their own rule. Click a button, something happens, that's the rule now. 20 pages can't beat the one sentence in their head.

The eye does not read. It scans.

Land on a page and the eye looks for bold first, then the headline, then the first sentence. Everything else is gray noise.

Attention doesn't survive a wiki of forty linked pages anymore, it survives one real experience, written down like GitLab's handbook, versioned as it changes, built to be the source an agent quotes back to whoever asks.

Seth Godin has said this for years: more does not build trust, it builds doubt. A long document does not say "we thought of everything." It says "we are hiding something."

Good documentation does not have to be long. It should be scannable by both humans and agents. Especially for agents, using Markdown (.md) format.