Community AI-Readiness Pattern Catalog

A curated catalog of patterns that make documentation more or less readable to AI agents and LLMs, surfaced by attendees of Write the Docs Portland 2026 Writing Day on Sunday, May 3, 2026.

How this catalog is built

We use two surfaces during Writing Day:

1. The Pattern Tracker (live working surface) — a Google Sheet where every contributor logs every pattern they spot, in real time. It’s messy, fast, and grows row-by-row throughout the day.
   • Live shared sheet (view-only for attendees): Quillship Pattern Tracker on Google Sheets
   • Offline backup in this repo: pattern-tracker.xlsx
2. This catalog (curated artifact) — a polished markdown doc published end-of-day (or shortly after the conference), drawn from the most useful patterns surfaced in the tracker. Each pattern gets a name, a description, an example, a fix recipe, and the contributor(s) credited.

Important: This file does not auto-update from the Sheet. The Sheet is the live working surface; this catalog is the curated end-of-day artifact. Patterns make it into this file when they’re cleaned up, deduplicated, and credited.

Reading the catalog

Each entry follows the format:

### Pattern name
**What it looks like:** concrete example or signal
**Why AI struggles with it:** one or two sentences
**Fix:** what to do instead
**Example:** in the Quillship demo or a real audited site
**Did the audit tool detect this?** Yes / Partial / No — plus a note on which signal moved (or whether the tool missed it)
**Spotted by:** contributor first names

Patterns

Patterns will be added here as the day’s tracker rows are reviewed and curated. The catalog will be committed to this file and pushed before the end of the conference.

1. (first pattern goes here)

Contributors

(Names added with permission as the catalog is curated.)

Anti-patterns the demo was seeded with

The canonical anti-pattern list — organized under the eight AI-readiness criteria — lives in CONTRIBUTING.md → AI-readiness criteria. The catalog above will confirm or refine those patterns based on what attendees actually surface today.

License

CC0 — public domain. Reuse this catalog however you want.