alt Hacker NewsIn my years of programming, I find that humans rarely give documentation more than a cursory glance up until they have specific questions. Then they ask another person if one is available rather than read for the answer.
The biggest problem is that humans don't need the documentation until they do. I recall one project that extensively used docblock style comments. You could open any file in the project and find at least one error, either in the natural language or the annotations.
If the LLM actually uses the documentation in every task it performs- or if it isn't capable of adequate output without it- then that's a far better motivation to document than we actually ever had for day to day work.
Replies
The other problem is that documentation is always out of date, and one wrong answer can waste more time than 10 "I don't knows".
I have discovered that the measure of good documentation is not whether your team writes documentation, but is instead determined by whether they read it.
I think this really depends on culture. If you target OS APIs or the libc, the documentation is stellar. You have several standards and then conceptual documentation and information about particular methods all with historic and current and implementation notes, then there is also an interactive hypertext system. I solve 80% of my questions with just looking at the official documentation, which is also installed on my computer. For the remaining I often try to use the WWW, but these are often so specific, that it is more successful to just read the code.
Once I step out of that ecosystem, I wonder how people even cope with the lack of good documentation.