> He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before

Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy?

A lot of people aren't which I think is why the average joe hates it. These docs can still have AI generated mistakes which are easily glossed over by a regular human.

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datakan 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy?

Yes. That was just the writing portion, there is a whole team that works on publishing and proof reading and there are acceptance levels all the way up to the CISO where people validate they read it and approved of the contents. Even with that, no one cares about it.

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glaslong 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In general people always seem to want documentation, so they can pull it up exactly when they need it, but will do anything to avoid actually having to read it until that singular moment.

The number of meetings where I can answer all the other attendees' questions because I'm the only one who even skimmed the presenter's docs, I swear.....

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cogman10 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, IDK what to tell you then. Sometimes docs just go unread. There's a reason why "RTFM" is a meme.

It might be that they are wordy. It might be that your readers are lazy. It also might just be they don't realize the effort has been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality.

	▲	jrochkind1 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In this case, effort has _not_ been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality, and the potential readers know that, which is surely relevant.

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fluoridation 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume by "proof-reading" you don't mean just checking that the text doesn't contain spelling mistakes or is incoherent, but including that the content is actually correct. If your people actually invest that much into documentation, what the point of the LLM? Isn't the actual writing part like 10% of the total effort expended, in terms of man-hours?

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gorjusborg 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ignoring how a thing was created, is it useful to me (or anyone)?

The fascination with LLM coding seems rooted in the new ability to create something with very little effort. Unfortunately, some people do not see the trade comes at the moment you have to evaluate the output for fitness or quality.

It turns out that you often need to understand the thing pretty well in order to be qualified to determine the quality of the output. That tends to dilute time gains, unless you leave off the evaluation step.

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jasonlotito 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy?

Hi. I write lots of documentation already. I enjoy the taste of clean, fresh, accurate documentation.

Spot-check it for accuracy? I review it. The same way I would review other documentation in the past. The difference? Fewer errors and issues, and when I do find them, it's far easier to get things sorted out.

> A lot of people aren't

Correct. A lot of people aren't reviewing. Not even AI, just reviewing in general. And even when they review, they are only looking, not testing.

The difference is that before, it was a human mistake. Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes.

I don't want to pretend that documentation is easy, and well-made human documentation is still far better than the best AI documentation for the most part. But... it depends on the audience and purpose. Most importantly, AI documentation is good enough for most cases, and well-made human documentation is far rarer.

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fluoridation 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes.

That's because AIs make mistakes no human would. If you're documenting a function, you might misspell something (or orthographically spell something that should be misspelled), or confuse two functions with similar names; you won't reference a function or feature that doesn't and has never existed.

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cogman10 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> you won't reference a function or feature that doesn't and has never existed.

That does sometimes exist in human docs. I've stumbled on "aspirational" features in docs that never really existed but were more just intended to exist.

To me the mistakes are bad, but it's also that the docs tend to be pretty low quality IMO. LLMs tend to like to write novels where a sentence would have been better.

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fluoridation 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's true. I don't understand why they do that. People don't write like that, we're pretty economical. It's not even that they're repetitive to emphasize a point, they just engage in horrific circumlocution. Is it, like, that the facts of the input only percolate through the network when they emit a token, so they only "think" when they're outputting something? I don't know if that's it, but that's what I would think if I caught someone writing like this, that they're writing faster than they can think, so they fill the void with vacuous noise.

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cogman10 8 hours ago | parent [-]

My non-serious assumption is that they prioritized the classic writings of 1800s authors like Johann David Wyss in their training. These authors were paid by the word, which resulted in long pointless chapters in their books just to milk money out of the printers.

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techjamie 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Much of the internet from the time the training data was initially collected wasn't much different. Consider how much blogspam and listicle SEO/ad optimized content would've been in the training data that is primarily interested in meandering for as long as possible to milk ad views.

	▲	fluoridation 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In text? That doesn't really work. Nowadays that's become sort of a meme in video essays on YouTube, but in text you have complete control of the data rate. Listicles and those sorts of things were pretty pointless, but they didn't beat around the bush like LLMs do. I really don't exaggerate when I say I've never seen a human write like that. Like, the moment I start reading AI responses I feel the urge to skip ahead to get to the point. I probably read at most like 10% of the words they spit out.

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watwut 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Now it's an AI mistake, and people HATE AI mistakes. Even if the number of AI mistakes is fewer than the human mistakes.

I dont know. We have this hype cycle where ai or cars are talked about flawless or so much better then people ... years before they actually are. And then in each time we find that nah, they were not but now this time they certainly are.

And each time I read on HN about how people expect so much better from tech then from people. And usually, when you look at it, the opposite is true. Where human get criticised, tech gets tripple benefit of doubt.