The Role of Technical Documentation in Shaping Network Environments

The Documentation Paradox

Consider a scenario where you are troubleshooting a critical switching issue that's behaving strangely. The configuration points to one thing, the documentation says another, and the actual forwarding behavior does something entirely different. Which one of these is 'real'? If all three instances are real, even partially, are we talking about multiple realities that coexist? This isn't just a technical headache. To me, it's a fundamental question about the nature of technological existence.

In the physical world, we document what already exists. A switch remains a switch whether or not someone writes about it. But in the technological realm, it could be argued that this doesn’t always hold good. When you document, something peculiar happens; documentation becomes a form of technological genesis. For example, when you write that a JUNOS command set vlans production vlan-id 100 creates a production VLAN, you're not just describing. In fact, you're participating in the creation of a new kind of network entity.

The Birth of Network Objects

Consider the use case where you are documenting a JUNOS configuration command. Before it's documented, it exists in a state of pure potential, a syntax that can configure and control specific networking functions. But the moment an Information Developer writes, 'The command show ethernet-switching table displays all MAC address entries,' something profound occurs. The command gains not just definition, but identity as well.The documentation acts as a network DNA that encodes not just what the command does, but what it is. When the network engineers read 'Configure port speed channelization', they are not learning about a property. They are witnessing the birth of a promise, a contract, a new form of operational truth.

This reality-creation extends to the CLI's embedded help strings and beyond. For example, let’s assume that when you type set interfaces ?, you see 'Configure interface properties' as the command line help string. However, that brief phrase in a help string, mostly carefully reviewed by documentation teams, doesn't merely describe functionality. It conveys intent to transform raw code into purposeful action and to bridge the gap between developer’s imagination and administrator’s understanding. Aren’t even these help strings, often conceived as simple guidance, actually micro-documentation that shapes how the world understands, interprets, and interacts with the networks?

The Ontological Stack of Networking Documentation

Think of networking documentation as existing in layers, each one adding depth to our network reality:

Layer 1: The Physical stack—Hardware guides and specifications, port configurations, line card descriptions, component manuals such as optical transceivers and so on where documentation anchors network fundamentals to perceivable physical reality etched in silicon and fiber.

Layer 2: The Logical stack—CLI command references, VLAN configurations, switching table structures, where switching concepts are linked to executable configurations.

Layer 3: The Operational stack—What’s New and Release Notes, Feature guides, Quick starts, Network Onboarding manuals (Juniper Apstra), and so on.

Layer 4: The Maintenance stack—Troubleshooting guides, tracing, debugging interpretations, error message logs, and so on where the dynamics of packet forwarding capability meets the human endeavor to set things in motion.

Layer 5: The Wisdom stack—Best practices, use-case documents, network design models, network operations and maintenance references where experiential wisdom acts as a chain that accumulates the learning across multiple iterations and shapes the product experience and the network roadmap.

Each layer doesn't just describe the layer below, but transforms it. A perfectly functional switching protocol becomes legacy not through age, but through documentation that declares it so. A security vulnerability doesn't exist (or isn’t formalized) until it's documented in a security advisory or release note and assigned a tracking ID or number.

The Memory Board for your Product

Documentation serves as the memory board for your networking product. It becomes a vast, interconnected space where networking products and components live, evolve, and relate to each other. For example, if we write 'STP is deprecated in favor of RSTP' we're not just providing information. We are performing an archaeology of switching devices, mapping the evolutionary history of network protocols.

Also, consider a newly released network switch that exists in multiple states. A switching table simultaneously exists as:

• Physical forwarding entries in switch memory

• Logical MAC address mappings in the forwarding table

• Conceptual models in documentation

• Lived experiences in network administrator papers

In this instance, we can see that the documentation of the switching table co-exists with other networking artifacts in the present. In a ‘Coming Soon’ entry, the written text connects to the future of the network product.Hence, we can argue that documentation cuts across the timelines and works as a parallel network of knowledge that is supplementary, yet critical, to the actual product timelines. In that sense, 'memory board' could be reductionist in scope. Documentation is a time board for the knowledge and functions that a networking product is capable of.

The Living Document Phenomenon

Another fascinating aspect of product documentation in the networking domain is its living nature. Unlike traditional documents that capture a moment in time, network documentation exists in a state of constant becoming. Every software release note, every configuration example, every troubleshooting guide update doesn't just modify the documentation, but also modifies the reality of the network itself.

This creates a feedback loop where product documentation shapes switching design, which shapes configuration and traffic flow, which shapes user interaction and feedback, which shapes documentation. The switch always becomes what its documentation says it is, but only as long as the documentation remains alive and actively maintained. As a reverse metric, teams involved in information development could therefore conclude that gaps between documentation and the product is a guarantee that customer experience is being compromised.

The Implications

Based on the above theory, we can infer that product existence is strongly linked to the functional quality of its documentation. A feature that isn't documented doesn't just lack visibility, but also lacks full operational reality. Such products exist in the liminal space between potential and reality, waiting for the documentary act that will bring it into its full being. A full-blown product with partial, insufficient, or error-prone documentation would be an ideal use-case for you to validate this in your product documentation scope. Use the metric of page views, feedback, and bugs on documentation products to triangulate the areas of improvement or transformation.

In summary, it is important to stress that documentation is a key stakeholder in networking infrastructure ownership, responsibility, and stewardship. If documentation partially creates the reality of our networks, then the act of world-building that we strive to achieve through our products will remain half-told.

The Multi-dimensional Translation Problem

Having argued that the documentation in itself is a parallel network, the natural progression of this logic gets more interesting. Every piece of networking documentation is essentially a translation, say, from the pure logic of frame forwarding or network operation to the complexities of human language. But translation always involves transformation into a different scale, often incomparable. For example, when we document that a command is 'fast' or 'reliable' or that a log is 'extensive', we're describing performance metrics as conceived by the standards of human logic and expectations. This translation process creates what we might call documentary friction. The inevitable gaps between what the network does and how documentation translates it into what would match the human understanding of what the network does.

To this argument, I would like to add the complexity of analyzing AI-generated documentation or content. While AI in itself is a machine-generated environment, it is interesting to note that AI currently aligns with the need to generate documentation that is human-centric, not machine-centric. Clearly, this use-case emphasizes that AI works as the 'AI-assistant' with strong emphasis on the term ‘assistance’ to humans. But by doing so, AI-assisted content creates a new gap; one that is formed between what the network does, how the LLM of the AI agent interprets it, and then eventually translates it into human equivalent logic that it gathered from its training.

Though the acts involved in the whole product literature development lifecycle seem simpler on the surface, we can see from this use-case that there is more complexity at hand than what meets the eye. With this whole exercise of ‘translation’, aren’t we forcing machines to down-scale themselves so that we can stay informed? That is for another discussion. However, let us be clear that these gaps that we just identified aren't bugs. Rather, they are windows into the fundamental challenge of bridging digital and human reality. It has a clearly-defined power hierarchy that defines the human as the apex consumer. The rest of the entities in the production chain strive to meet human ‘technological’ needs and thereby manufacture parts of the latest 'human reality'.

The Future 'Intended Audience'

As introduced earlier, when we move toward more complex systems of AI that writes configurations, automation that generates documentation, and documentation that creates switching policies, there will be deeper questions at hand. We could encounter what we can call 'documentation sovereignty'. It could be a fundamental question about who or what controls the authoritative version of technical truth.

Consider a scenario in which an automation system documents a configuration that it creates. The documentation might read: 'VLAN-100: optimized.' The AI understands this perfectly, other AI systems implement it flawlessly, but human administrators find it meaningless. It does not tell humans what was actually optimized or how. In other words, what if the AI documentation no longer bothers to translate the document to match human logic or to verify whether humans understand the documentation? In such a machine-operated scenario, our networking products and systems at large could still be highly functional. We could witness machine-native designs that achieve perfect efficiency while generating outputs that speak to human administrators like poetry written in a foreign language. The critical question then is, will we be 'removed' from the core realm of knowledge of our own products?

This system creates a mismatch in terms of update cycles as well. While human information developers update guides once per release, AI systems might regenerate documentation every few hours or minutes. As a human, how do you troubleshoot when the documentation describing your current configuration could have changed by the time you finish reading it?

At some point, will product literature cease to exist, in a meaningful operational sense for mankind? Will it cease to be that source of wisdom and power that help humans have control over the realities of our manufactured products and realities? What we could truly encounter is a crisis of technical authority. If an AI system documents a configuration that no human can understand, yet the network operates flawlessly, what does that correctness mean to us?

In short, we could move from documentation as human-interpretable truth to documentation as machine-verifiable functionality. But for now, we can conclude that we have a thriving human-centric documentation set that can be enhanced and improved to a great extent with AI-powered tools, but one which gives us immense ownership and power in the networking ecosystem.

The next time you write about your networking product or document a configuration, remember that you are not just documenting commands or procedures. You are participating in the ongoing creation of a product, bridging the gap between human intention and experience, and thereby better understanding and part-owning the realities of the networking realm.