alt Hacker NewsA problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy. They want to document every path and edge case rather focusing on what really matters.
It can be addressed with prompting, but you have to fight this constantly.
Replies
bigiain • last Sunday at 3:12 AM
I think probably my most common prompt is "Make it shorter. No more than ($x) (words|sentences|paragraphs)."
➕ show 1 reply
> A problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy
This is one of the problems I feel with LLM-generated code, as well. It's almost always between 5x and long and 20x (!) as long as it needs to be. Though in the case of code verbosity, it's usually not because of thoroughness so much as extremely bad style.