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saagarjhayesterday at 3:59 PM3 repliesview on HN

Documentation is one place where humans should have input. If an LLM can generate documentation, why would I want you to generate it when I can do so myself (probably with a better, newer model)?


Replies

simonwyesterday at 5:19 PM

I definitely want documentation that a project expert has reviewed. I've found LLMs are fantastic at writing documentation about how something works, but they have a nasty tendency to take guesses at WHY - you'll get occasional sentences like "This improves the efficiency of the system".

I don't want invented rationales for changes, I want to know the actual reason a developer decided that the code should work that way.

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ACCount37yesterday at 5:22 PM

That's great if those humans are around to have that input.

Not so much when you have a lot of code from 6 years ago, built around an obscure SDK, and you have to figure out how it works, and the documentation is both incredibly sparse and in Chinese.

ameliusyesterday at 5:58 PM

Because it takes time and effort to write documentation.

If people __can__ actually read undocumented code with the help of LLMs, why do you need human-written documentation really?

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