Getting started

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Documentation projects fail because they are treated as projects: a push to finish, after which the thing rots. ZestreaDB is built on the opposite premise — documentation designed never to be finished, that stays true on its own. Progressive documentation is not one feature among several here; it is the point. The rest of the product is what makes that real rather than aspirational:

Typed knowledge — write what you know now, in the right slot, without first deciding what kind of document you are producing. What goes where is the whole map.

Knowledge travels — write it once on an object and it appears in every flow that contains it, so effort accumulates instead of repeating.

Drift — when the schema changes, drift points at exactly what to revisit, so what you wrote stays honest without anyone auditing it.

Absence is not failure — a blank field is normal, not a gap someone must close. You do not have to finish it.

The happy path, once that lands:

  1. Create a workspace — one home per database.

  2. Import your schema — bring the real structure in, or sketch freeform if the database does not exist yet.

  3. Create a flow — diagram one area that tells a story, built from the schema so it stays true.

  4. Add and connect nodes — put the objects on the canvas and draw how the data moves.

  5. Describe an object — write what only lives in people’s heads: why it exists, what breaks it.

  6. Read and share — the three outputs: a readable document, a diagram, and AI-ready context.