I kept fixing the same problem in three different places.

Someone would land on the GitHub repo for my local AI gateway and need a fast answer: what is this thing, what does it support, and how do I start it?

Instead, they got the same thing a lot of open-source projects accidentally grow into: a README that wanted to be a landing page, onboarding guide, operator manual, architecture index, and release checklist at the same time.

That works for a while. Then every edit makes it worse.

The failure mode was boring but expensive

The project is CliGate , a local AI gateway that sits between tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, dashboard chat, channel workflows, and upstream model providers.

As the product surface expanded, the docs expanded with it:

protocol translation details

account pools and API keys

app routing and model mapping

dashboard pages

runtime sessions

Telegram and Feishu channels

local manuals inside the product

The result was predictable:

the GitHub README kept…