Smart DocsValidate and Heal
Captured documentation has one weakness that written documentation does not: screenshots go stale silently. Prose that is out of date at least still reads as prose. A screenshot of a button that no longer exists looks perfectly fine — right up to the moment a reader cannot find the button.
Validate and heal is the maintenance loop for that problem.
⚠️ Scope note. This page describes the intended maintenance loop. Confirm the exact controls against the Captures screen in your workspace before relying on any schedule described here.
A guide built from a capture is only as current as the product it recorded. Three things go wrong over time:
Cosmetic drift is worth ignoring. Structural drift makes documentation actively wrong, and it is the case worth catching automatically.
Validation checks a capture against the product as it is now, rather than as it was when recorded. It looks for the signals stored with each step — the element, its label, the page — and reports where reality no longer matches.
The important design decision: validation reports per step, not per guide. “This guide is stale” is not actionable. “Step 4 targets an element that no longer exists” is.
Healing repairs what can be repaired without a full re-record.
Because the click highlight is stored as a rectangle rather than burned into the image, a hotspot can be moved without touching the screenshot — and a screenshot can be replaced without losing the highlight. That separation is what makes partial repair possible at all.
💡 The rule of thumb: retake steps, re-record flows. If two or three screens changed, heal them. If the flow itself changed order or gained steps, record it again — patching a structural change step by step costs more than a fresh five-minute run.
The failure mode worth naming: treating every flag as a task. A UI refresh will light up every capture you own. Triage by severity — structural first, labels second, cosmetic never — or the queue becomes something the team learns to ignore.
💡 Prioritise by readership, not by age. A two-year-old guide nobody opens is not a problem. A three-month-old guide on your onboarding path is.
Automations watch your written content for drift and can flag or fix pages on a schedule. Validate and heal is the same idea applied to captured content, where the drift is visual rather than textual.
Use them together: automations keep the prose honest, validation keeps the screenshots honest.
Healing a capture matters more than it first appears, because Studio reads the guide.
A reel built from a stale capture shows stale screens — and unlike a written page, nobody edits a video after publishing. Healing the source and regenerating is the entire maintenance story for video, which is why keeping the capture current is worth more effort than it seems.