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For me AI just brought back documentation. All new frameworks lack documentation big time. The last good one for me was a DOS book! I don't think newer develope
by GoToRO 2y ago
For me AI just brought back documentation. All new frameworks lack documentation big time. The last good one for me was a DOS book! I don't think newer developers even have an idea of what good documentation looks like.
Even so, AI will propose different things at different times and you still need an experienced developer to make the call. In the end it replaces documentation and typing.
- choilive 2y agoI think AI just made documentation more valuable. For public facing projects - your documentation just became part of the LLM's training data, so its now extra important your documentation is thorough and accurate because you will have a ton of developers getting answers from that system. For private projects, your documentation can now be fed into a finetuning dataset or a RAG system, achieving the same effect.
- jakub_g 2y agoEvery now and then there's a HN discussion "how do you manage internal documentation" where most commenters write something like "there's no point writing documentation because it quickly becomes outdated". (There were two such threads in just last days). Might explain why nothing is documented anymore.
- jcgrillo 2y agoMaybe that also explains why (approximately) nothing really works right.
- tensor 2y agoYes, it can both help you write it but also, if you start with the documentation, e.g. the comment describing what function does, AI becomes orders of magnitude better and actually helping write the function, so it actually forces developers to better document their code!
- Sakos 2y agoI've noticed the same thing. I can get great results by being detailed in my comments and/or docstrings. A lot of the time I don't want the AI actually "thinking" for itself.
- vinibrito 2y agoOh hey I really love writing great docs, of course not always I have the opportunity to do so, but could you point me to one you consider great? Can be anything, no need to be some modern live docs. I want to see what is in the past that was so great but we lost, maybe I can incorporate some of it.
- GoToRO 2y agoI don't have any. I remember that book explain the command, what the purpose of the command was, the typical scenario for why you would need such command. It explained the options. No silly explanation like "-sort" sorts the output. It explained the return values also in detail. Explained the errors also in detail and what might cause the error. Most functions today are "explained" by reordering the words in the function name: "canUpdate()" returns true if $x can update.