Even better than gists is to use actual running code for examples.

http://gist-it.appspot.com/ allows you to do that, which we utilize in this tutorial: http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/tutorials/caching

Even more radical is using git for a step-by-step tutorial: http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/tutorials/agility is completely assembled from the commits of this repository: https://github.com/Hobo/agility-gitorial/commits/master

These are cool examples, but I'm not convinced of the utility here. Using a git history as a tutorial feels like trying to shim a wrench into a hammer.

What is needed is a form of CMS which can link some content to a patch, and I feel like there are better options out there for accomplishing that. It seems like maintaining this documentation going forward would be very challenging as git is not designed around making editing the past easy.

That's similar to http://bl.ocks.org/

Maybe I'm a whiny edge case but this drives me nuts because gists don't show up in google reader or when I use readability.

We definitely plan on caching it locally in the future so it should work.

Sweet use of Git!

Thanks :) We think it provides a great experience for our devs.