alt Hacker NewsAs long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.
Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.
The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.
The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'".
To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.
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"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".
If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out.
I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.