What is Readsmith

Readsmith is a Fair Source documentation platform. Point it at a repository of Markdown or MDX and it builds a complete docs site: navigation, search, a generated API reference, and the machine-readable outputs that AI agents consume. It runs on your own infrastructure with one Docker Compose file, or, soon, on Readsmith Cloud.

Three ideas carry the whole product

The reading experience is the product

Documentation is read far more often than it is written, so Readsmith spends its effort on the reading: a deliberate type scale set in Spectral and IBM Plex, a real reading measure, and first-class light and dark themes designed separately rather than inverted. Prose pages ship zero JavaScript; interactive pieces hydrate as islands only where a page asks for them.

Builds are precompiled and deterministic

Every build produces an immutable bundle: static HTML, an island manifest, search chunks, and the agent outputs. The same input produces byte-identical output, which is what makes caching correct and rollbacks honest: rolling back a deploy repoints to a previous bundle, nothing rebuilds.

Agents are first-class readers

The same build that renders pages for people projects them for machines:

• /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, a directory and a full-content export of every page
• every page served as plain Markdown for agents that ask for it
• an MCP server with live search and endpoint lookup
• an Agent Skill at /skill.md, following the agentskills.io format, generated from your docs into your own repository where you review it like code

What you get out of the box

• Markdown and MDX authoring with a component library: callouts, tabs, steps, cards, code groups, and more
• A generated API reference from an OpenAPI spec: one page per operation or one continuous page, with authored prose and the generated contract living together
• Search and Ask AI on your own model keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or a gateway); answers cite their sources
• Convention over configuration: a repository of Markdown with no config still builds a working site, and a docs.json config is accepted for migration
• Self-hosting that respects you: the app plus Postgres with pgvector is the entire stack; no external services, no telemetry you did not turn on

Who it is for

Teams who want documentation they own: the source in their repository, the site on their domain, the data in their database, and a reading experience they are proud to ship. Readsmith is Fair Source, released under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-MIT): free to self-host with every feature, no gates, and each release automatically becomes MIT two years after it ships.

Where to go next