First, the thing worth writing down
A manual always starts as a walk somebody knows by heart and has to explain again and again. This one goes from the front page of this site to a project’s demo, and it is the walk the recorder is about to follow.
Interactive demo · Web App
The manual writes itself while you work
AutoDoc is a documentation platform you host yourself. A browser extension records the flow while you use your own application, and what comes back is a step by step manual, already laid out on A4 sheets, ready to leave as PDF, PowerPoint, Word or Markdown.
Everything below is real. The captures are the ones the recorder took walking this very site, and the pages are the PDF that AutoDoc exported from them.
A manual always starts as a walk somebody knows by heart and has to explain again and again. This one goes from the front page of this site to a project’s demo, and it is the walk the recorder is about to follow.
Press record and walk the flow as you always do. The recorder keeps one step per click and per field you fill, photographs the screen the instant before you press and marks what you pressed. Inside the page it paints nothing, so no trace of it ends up in the captures.
What comes back is only the captures, in order, with what you pressed on each one. You drop the steps that were noise and give the manual a title. Press publish and they all travel to AutoDoc at once, where the draft composes itself.
The text of every step comes drafted by a vision model that read the captures in order, and the sheet is yours to compose. Drag one step beside another and the two share the width, so both end up exactly the same height.
The composition you are looking at is what comes out: a PDF with the original pixels, a PowerPoint with one slide per sheet, a Word to keep editing, or a Markdown with its captures alongside for a repository or a wiki.
One switch serves the manual at a secret address, with no account behind it and ready to embed in another site with an iframe. Revoke it and the link falls, taking its captures with it.
Documenting an application means photographing it with real data on screen: names, invoices, case files. That is why AutoDoc is built to be installed on a private server and nowhere else. It is Docker, Postgres and an object store, and it runs on a machine with no way out to the internet if that is what the data asks for. There is no account in the cloud, no third party holding the captures and no telemetry.
Nothing leaves here
The step texts are drafted by a vision model through OpenRouter, and it is the only thing that talks to the outside. Leave its key out of the environment and the steps arrive empty, to be written by hand. And when it is on, the model is your choice: OpenRouter lets you keep to providers that log nothing and train on nothing, so not even the captures sent for a draft stay anywhere.
Django and PostgreSQL behind Gunicorn, with the captures in an S3 compatible object store and served only through the application. The manual is composed once and printed by five exporters that share the same layout: WeasyPrint for the PDF, python-pptx for the slides, python-docx for the Word and a zip for the Markdown. The recorder is a Chrome MV3 extension that draws the highlight on the captured PNG inside a worker instead of touching the page, so a modal dialog on top of everything is no trouble and the application being documented never notices it is being watched.
