It's bad for us, but I imagine the tech writers feelings are even darker. They spent years being demonstrating how important good docs were, nobody in management cared, they were mostly laid off and discarded before there was even a credible replacement available.

One of the clients I’m consulting with has one of the best cloud onboarding docs I’ve ever seen. Lays out exactly the services supported. Who does what pieces. What is self service. They break out latency differences between the cloud environments and on-premises. A serious amount of good work that’s incredibly useful working within their system. I use it frequently. Their head of cloud engineering has a permanent “away” message on Teams pleading with people to check the cloud docs first instead of just asking him directly. I would be frustrated too.

When I get that, I just repeat the question "where did you look in the docs?", or just "go look at the docs now" if they're really dense. I can't help them until they have a better answer.

It takes a few tries before they internalize that they need to have a doc link before expecting my help. Once they do, I might take the next step to saying "here's the answer; can you update the docs so the next person doesn't have to ask?" And it might take a few tries before that sticks too. My goal is to eventually turn them into someone who evangelizes the docs themselves.

When I write peer reviews for my colleagues, I describe their attitude toward documentation. If that's "they refuse to open the docs, frequently wasting their colleagues' time", it's not gonna go well. If it's "they make nice doc edits after I ask them", a little better. If it's "they proactively maintain the documentation", better still.

Of course all this is for stuff that one could reasonably expect to be documented. Help thinking through a design problem or debugging their in-progress PR is generally a different situation.

That's when you direct them to the docs.

People rag on StackOverflow for being mean, but it was a good training ground for developing habits that satisfy the social contract of professional spaces.

Did it solve the problem? If so, why people had to keep repeating it everywhere the entire time?

Because people are lazy, or new, or for some other reason turned to asking questions of strangers in a public forum rather than making the small effort to look for the solutions on their own.

It's the same reason that Let Me Google That For You was invented.

But you can tell it to once (in CLAUDE.md for example) and it will nearly every time (it's getting much better at that). Since opus 4.7 (which I consider a downgrade overall) it's been much better at following CLAUDE.md . I even have an intentional contradiction in my user-level CLAUDE.md and the project levels, so I can tell which one is taking precedent or if both are disregarded, and it follows at least one of them most of the time, and it follows the local one 95% of the time.

While they absolutely do fail as you say (though in my experience not by default), this failure mode is still a massive improvement over the frequent human case of guessing based on the function/class/property/argument names.

Now, a really good human collaborator who reads all the stuff and thinks carefully, that was still better than what I saw from AI models at the start of this year. But I've also worked with my share of idiots, and been one too.

I'm not going to get into if *current* models can or can't reliably do any particular thing to any particular standard; previously my comparison was the same conversations with regard to video game computer graphics in the 90s always being "photorealistic" when they really weren't*; now, I'm starting to feel such discussions have the same vibes as Tesla fans insisting that "FSD-{insert current version here} solves all the problems and is a real breakthrough and the Rototaxi will totes conquer the marketplace this time for real bro, just one more version bro", etc.

* https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26

if you find yourself saying 'if you tell it to' a lot about LLMs that usually just says something about your prompting methods.

or, in other words , if you want the thing to always read the documentation then make that a strongly highlighted point both in pre-prompts, active prompts, and memory.

Sometimes you get lucky and it both looks up the documentation and then ignores it and makes stuff up.