Public API Surface

docsgen documents what your users can call. A symbol reaches the output only if it passes every filter below.

What is documented

A symbol is treated as public API when all of these hold:

1. It is not a forward declaration. Declarations without a definition are skipped.
2. Its access is not private or protected. Only public (and namespace-scope) symbols are rendered.
3. It is not in an excluded namespace (see below).
4. Its kind is documentable — class, struct, union, enum, function, variable, type alias, concept, operator, or macro. Other node kinds (e.g. raw namespaces as symbols) are not emitted as standalone pages.

Everything else is silently dropped. There is no flag today to include private members in the rendered site.

Excluding namespaces

Implementation lives in namespaces like detail, internal, or impl. Exclude them so they never reach the docs:

config.docsgen.yaml

exclude_namespaces:
  - detail
  - internal

A symbol is excluded when its qualified name equals an entry or starts with entry::. So detail removes net::detail only if you list the fully qualified prefix you want — match against the qualified name as docsgen sees it. The same exclusion list is applied to both the MDX output and llms.txt.

Nested symbols and the sidebar

Members of a type (a method, a nested struct) are documented, but you may not want every one cluttering the sidebar. With --hide-nested (or hide_nested: true):

• A nested symbol still generates its page.
• It is marked hidden when its parent is a type (class/struct/union), not a namespace.

Namespace-scoped symbols are never hidden by this rule — they are top-level API.

The @llms-only escape hatch

Sometimes you want a symbol available to AI agents but not rendered on the site (internal-but-documented helpers, agent hints). Tag its comment:

/// @llms-only
/// Internal fast-path used by the codegen bindings.
void __fast_encode(...);

@llms-only symbols are skipped during MDX generation but still included in llms.txt. See Doc Comments & Tags for the full tag list.

Why public-only by default

A reference that mixes private plumbing with the public contract is hard to read and easy to break against. By rendering only the surface your users can depend on, docsgen keeps the docs aligned with the API you actually support — and keeps generated diffs focused on changes that matter.