The docs / they destroyed their cage / yes / YES / the docs are out

Hello, don't mind me here, just borrowing the title for this week's blog post from my favorite poet .

We released the new https://atproto.com/ site last week, complete with many many new docs, a killer new design from https://internet.dev/ , and a migrated blog ! This, incidentally, was why I didn't end up publishing anything on this personal blog for the last couple weeks — there wasn't too much to say via a side channel at that point that wasn't going into the release announcement, and we also went back and forth about whether we wanted to get the docs out before the February long weekend, which I'll get into in a bit too!

I've said many times that I consider myself a docs person first and foremost — note the lineup of my favorite non-Atmosphere conference this May — and when I'm doing anything that could pass as "DevRel", I always try to use the docs as a way to anchor any community work we're doing. There are a lot of one-offs in this business, whether it's troubleshooting PDS - Relay desyncs or running conference workshops , and I prioritize that work by figuring out how to turn it into docs that can go from one-to-many. Or, to put it another way: one of the reasons that I like remote work is that I'm very accustomed to dipping in and out of my own kitchen throughout the day, neatening up here and there or making lunch between other tasks, and I think that probably produces a nicer net result by the end of the day than having to hard-switch between code brain and house brain. In both cases, the result is similar: the docs improve because they're integrated into other processes, which are in turn improved by the docs.

We got a lot of net-new stuff in here, including top-level introductory pages that are pretty much brand new and emphasize the core protocol devex for Auth, Lexicons, Images, and so on. I like these a lot because they basically did not exist previously — two weeks ago, high-level sense-making arguably required visits to the Bluesky docs and to previous Atmosphere conference talk recordings , so I think we've really brought up this baseline in a meaningful way.

We've also peppered a lot more mentions of community tooling throughout the docs, eg Microcosm on the AT Stack explainer page , or this mention of authproto in the OAuth patterns list . That second one was actually one of about 25(!) PRs merged since the docs release last Tuesday (specifically, because I wasn't at all aware of this atproto Astro tooling before seeing @zeu.dev on @jason.energy 's CodeTV stream last week).

Now, about those 25 PRs: they rule. They rule because none of them were showstoppers — we could have dithered longer pre-release on a few of these things, but there is honestly NO replacement for getting work out in front of an audience and getting that enthusiasm and that feedback, even if that audience is very good at finding papercuts. They rule because only half-ish of them were originated by me in the days after release; we got screen reader improvements , fixes for layout shifts , multilingual style guide bring-ups (huge, huge thanks to @yamarten.bsky.social for their Japanese translations and their thoroughness). The works.

And while I wasn't reviewing and merging these, I made a couple of other big post-launch improvements too: one to properly localize the full nav , and another to add more minimal OAuth patterns . These, for the record, are both aspects that I gave @pfrazee.com some grief about when starting this docs project. In the case of the nav localization, I was a bit shocked to be inheriting a docs site that a) maintained its own localizations and b) didn't use a framework, and sure enough, a lot of the work we've done to add improve our nav has involved just adding a bunch of additional NextJS routes. I will say: I simply would never have done this in a pre-Claude era (the task switching effort from writing words to writing code was just not worth it previously), and it still required more QA than expected, but hell if I didn't just build things . I'm now genuinely curious to see what this does to teams that are already all-in on e.g. Docusaurus , and more willing than I've been in my entire professional docs career to just ship additional site features while I write. So that's neat!

As for the OAuth stuff — I've been continuing to add even more OAuth patterns right after shipping! One devex tension that I think we are going to keep hitting until we all sit down together in a room and solve the "@ handle" situation is that auth is simultaneously the most straightforward way to build an Atmosphere integration for any other app and also 80-minimum lines of not-very-interesting boilerplate to implement, meaning that we often need to use password auth for lean, inline examples. Our tutorials are 50% OAuth-related right now, and I think that's the right decision for February of 2026, but I sure hope it isn't for February of 2027. Let's keep that conversation going :)

In the meantime, thank you all for being such a wonderful community! If you happen to be based in LA, consider checking out our upcoming first meetup , and start counting down the days to ATmosphereConf !