[Chris_Newton]

One of the things I recommend to the startups I advise is to include documentation within the repository.

Agreed, this can help. I sometimes wonder, having written a substantial project in literate programming¹ style once, whether that approach doesn’t deserve more exploration. Then not only is your documentation kept in the same repo as your code, your source files themselves almost become documentation first and code second.

You definitely have to do a lot of things quite differently to how we typically do them today to make that idea work well, but I suspect it could be like a good static type system, incurring a modest extra cost up-front but with a big long-term pay-off once you’ve figured out the tools and processes to take advantage of it.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming