For people and agents
Write once for two readers: the design choices that keep pages useful to people and to retrieval systems alike.
A documentation page has two readers: a person on the page, and a machine that retrieves a piece of it to answer a question. The documentation is written once, for both.
Sections that stand alone
A retrieval system does not return a page. It returns a chunk, usually one section, with no context around it. So every ## section is written to be read alone. The heading names the content specifically enough to match a search, and the first sentence works without the section before it.
Diagrams as text
A diagram is a Mermaid code fence, never an image. The text of the diagram reaches an agent reading the page as markdown; an image reference does not. A diagram also never stands alone: the prose beneath it walks the same flow.
One bar for every draft
The vocabulary and pattern bans apply to every author. A page written by a person and one drafted with an agent meet the same bar: no repeated frames, no filler, no decorative dashes. The patterns are listed in Word choice.