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Comment by sgtwompwomp | Hacker News Reader

Mintlify is really good. If you're a serious developer tool not sure why you wouldn't use it. For example I went into your docs and I don't see AI chat so I can ask quick, natural language questions. No MCP I can install so Cursor can query. Prob no llms.txt. No quick Copy to Markdown. This stuff is table stakes, if you don't have it and a competitor does, I'm not even considering you guys

It's just a worse developer experience. Fine if you aren't a serious business, but yeah I wouldn't play down the value of Mintlify or similar products. It's seriously good and it's why huge companies use it

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>I don't see AI chat so I can ask quick, natural language questions. No MCP I can install so Cursor can query. Prob no llms.txt. No quick Copy to Markdown.

It's not the site's job to add those features though. If you want that experience there are ways to get it without adding bloat to every page on the web. Scraping a static site and answering questions/summarizing is a solved problem.

It is the sites job to make documentation available to the users, no?

It’s so odd for a tech focused crowed to be so opposed to newer technology.

Users are getting used to natural language search, not having it will be perceived as friction.

Users are increasingly turning to agentic coding tools, those tools do best when documentation is available via an MCP server. Not having one will make it harder for people to use your product.

I'm not opposed to the idea of natural language search, my point is the tools should be on the user side. Right now, I can ask questions about plain text pages that haven't been updated in 30 years directly in Firefox with no effort from the site operator. If an agent needs to have direct access to documentation, it's trivial for it to download pages autonomously (or even set up its own MCP server). There's literally no reason to demand that millions of sites independently add features that browsers and agents already have better and more uniform versions of.

Is it surprising that an AI fanatic wants/needs to be handheld?

It's not a business's job to make their documentation accessible to their potential and current customers?

I would ask if you've started a real business but it's clear you haven't. It is 100% on a developer tool startup to provide documentation that is easily accessible. If they don't, customers will struggle to get value. If you think this isn't true, then you are ignoring the gigantic market of companies purchasing documentation products (look at Mintlify's customer base for reference)

There is no way I'm asking my customers to scrape my docs and build their own MCP server and AI assistant just to access it easily.

Not everything is a business, you know? As far as I know tangled is not one.

It's barely a value-add when agents can scrape the docs themselves and browsers have the reading tools built in.

>I would ask if you've started a real business but it's clear you haven't.

I wouldn't speak so authoritatively about this stuff if I didn't know anything about running a business. My lemonade stand was extremely successful in the geographic area it was marketed in (~10 blocks around my house). I was planning on going public but unexpected regulatory issues (end of 4th grade summer break) forced me to reevaluate. Though these new agentic lemon beverage developments seem like they might draw me back into it...

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