Documentation Variable Builder
Extracts and documents variables in technical documentation prompt templates — feature name, purpose, setup, usage, limitations, and troubleshooting.
Overview
Technical documentation templates get reused across features, services, and versions — and the variable names that work for one feature often get modified slightly for the next. Over time, a documentation template accumulates variants: {{feature}}, {{featureName}}, {{componentName}}, all used interchangeably. When the template is shared across a technical writing team or integrated into a docs pipeline, these inconsistencies surface as substitution errors. Documenting and standardising the variable set once prevents the problem across every page the template generates.
Workflow
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Open in Prompt Variable Builder
Load the documentation template. The tool detects all ten variables including featureName, setupSteps, usageExample, limitations, and troubleshooting.
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Check for naming variants
If your existing templates use {{feature}}, {{featureName}}, and {{component}} interchangeably, the similarity check will surface them. Rename to one consistent form.
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Set types and add format descriptions
Version is text. SetupSteps and troubleshooting are best described as numbered lists. RelatedResources should specify whether URLs or section titles are expected.
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Export for the docs pipeline
Use the JSON schema in the pipeline that feeds variables into the static site generator. Use Markdown as the variable reference for the writing team.
Why This Works
- Feature name is the variable most often named inconsistently across documentation templates — standardising it once prevents substitution mismatches across the entire docs set
- Troubleshooting and limitations are variables where format ambiguity is highest — a description field specifying numbered steps vs. prose prevents the output from varying by writer
- A typed variable schema shared with the engineering team ensures terminology alignment before documentation is written
Best for
- Documentation templates reused across multiple features, APIs, or services
- Teams where engineers and technical writers both fill in different sections of the same template
- Documentation pipelines that substitute variables programmatically before rendering to HTML or Markdown
Not for
- One-off documentation pages written by hand without a standard template
- Documentation that changes format entirely between product areas or teams
Use cases
- Standardising the variable names in a documentation template shared across an engineering and technical writing team
- Documenting expected format for setupSteps and usageExample before the template is used for a new feature batch
- Generating a TypeScript interface for a documentation pipeline that populates a static site generator
- Exporting a variable reference that the technical writing team uses to align with the engineering team's terminology