Rebuilding Column's documentation. Tyson Rosage Software Designer Column has been busy. Rebuilding its documentation was always toward the bottom of the to-do list, partially because Column were dealing with an annoying (and common) problem: API documentation inevitably drifts from the API itself. A fix would take time and energy, but documentation is a kind of front lawn that signals a lot about how you live and work. So Column made time and came up with a solution: just make the docs and the API the same artifact. Column recently rebuilt its documentation to do just that, with two major changes: * The spec is the source of truth, and... * Its assumed audience is large language models Where Column started. When Column first launched the Column APIs, its product surface area was small enough that the documentation could be basic. Column wanted to ship something simple, so Column put everything on a single scrolling page, which conveniently doubled as a reason to skip building search - Cmd-F could handle anything users needed. That was the right shape for the API at the time. It worked less well as the API kept growing. The spec is the source of truth. That was the surface-level mess. Underneath it was a deeper one: the docs lived in a separate repository and on a separate site, with no real connection to the OpenAPI spec that defines the API. Column were maintaining the source of truth twice - once in the spec its API server already uses to generate types, and again in hand-written markdown in a different codebase entirely. Its fix was to move the docs into the same repo as the spec and write a generator: every build, the spec produces the complete API reference. A new endpoint and its documentation now arrive in the same pull request, get reviewed together, and ship in the same release. The two can't drift apart because they never ship apart. A nice side effect is that depending on the spec improved the spec. Every team thinks they have a singl source of truth until you ask which two repositories it lives in. Search and performance. With the structural problem solved, the rest of the rebuild was about the parts users feel directly - starting with search. The build produces a static index, the CDN serves it, the browser loads it once, and every query after that runs in memory. Everything is searchable now, from API references to written guides. Performance, meanwhile, is a function of shape. The new site is static HTML, one file per page, served from the same S3 and CloudFront Column were using before. Loading one endpoint loads one endpoint, and adding new content costs the new content rather than everyone else. The tradeoff is that build times grow with the corpus - at ten times its current content Column'll need to do builds incrementally, but not yet. Built for the way developers write code now. Those were the obvious upgrades. The bigger change was about who's actually reading the docs - increasingly, that isn't a developer in a browser but a language model the developer is talking to. Column has been on the receiving end of this often enough - wiring up someone else's API through an LLM ranges from genuinely helpful to comically bad. Column wanted ours on the helpful end, so Column made that workflow first-class rather than something developers had to work around. Every page is now published in two formats: the rendered version you see in the browser, and a clean markdown version alongside it with no UI components, no nav chrome, no JavaScript, just the text. A row of buttons on every page hands that markdown off: open in ChatGPT, open in Claude, or copy. The "open in" buttons launch a fresh chat with a prompt pointing the model at the markdown URL, so it reads its actual current content rather than guessing from its training data. In essence, Column'd rather your model read its docs than hallucinate them. Acknowledging that in 2026 feels about as weird as acknowledging mobile in 2012 - slightly awkward in the moment, fairly obvious in retrospect. Navigating an expansive API. Reading docs through a model is one thing. Reading them yourself is a different problem. Against an API with as many objects and parameters as ours, you more often find yourself stuck on finding the right thing to read than trying to decipher what something means. Every API page has a split layout, with parameter definitions on the left and a request/response example on the right. The two are wired together: hovering a parameter highlights the matching lines in the example, clicking one scrolls the example to that line, and clicking a line in the example scrolls back to the parameter's definition. After ten minutes of using it, a flat reference page feels oddly disconnected from itself. The stack, briefly. Fumadocs, Tailwind, one catch-all route. Adding a doc is adding a file. If it's an API reference, the spec generates it for you. Stack sections used to be the part engineers read most closely - these days they're mostly a list to paste into Claude and ask whether it would have picked the same. The result. The new docs keep pace with the API itself, surface what you're looking for, and meet you wherever you read them. If you're trying to understand how Column actually works, docs.column.com should now be the fastest way to get there. Take a look. Tyson Rosage Software Designer

Affiniti, an AI-powered financial operations platform for small and medium-sized businesses, has entered a financing agreement with Column N.A., a nationally chartered bank. Column will provide funding to support the growth of Affiniti's expanding SMB customer base and accelerate its card product expansion. Affiniti is building an integrated platform combining banking, bill pay, cards, expense management and AI-powered automation for traditionally underserved business sectors. The partnership with Column will help Affiniti scale its card offering as it expands into new product lines including banking and bill pay. Column, designed specifically to help companies build financial technology products, offers direct access to payment rails and lending programmes through a modern API platform. The bank will provide committed balance sheet funding to support Affiniti's growth trajectory.