A few weeks ago I published a post about building ncmds — a zero-configuration, Markdown-driven documentation site builder I was running on Flask + Python. The post got some traction, a handful of stars on GitHub, and a few contributors poking around the code. That was great.
Then I quietly rewrote the entire backend in TypeScript.
This post is the honest story of why.
A few months ago I found myself in a familiar situation: I needed to document a side project quickly. I had used Docusaurus before, loved it in theory, but every time I bootstrapped a new doc site I ended up fighting Node.js toolchains, React component boilerplate, and config files before I had written a single line of actual documentation. MkDocs was simpler, but it felt dated and lacked the AI-native features I increasingly wanted in my workflow.
So I did what every engineer does when the existing tools annoy them enough — I built my own. The result is ncmds (No Code Markdown Documentation Sites), and this post walks through the thinking, the architecture, and the lessons learned.