Steep provides documentation features integrated with editors. You can read Ruby code with documentations of classes and methods, which hovers near the cursor. You can write Ruby code with completion suggestions with documentation, helping you select the best option from the list.

The feature can be seen as a variant of traditional documentation tools, like RDoc and YARD. However, it is essentially different from other tools: instead of generating human-readable files, it provides an API. The API provides a data structure that allows retrieving the documentation associated with each component of Ruby programs.

In this talk, I will outline the implementation, discuss the requirements, and share design considerations behind the feature.