Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995

The trick about documentation is depth, not prose. You need context and understanding to write documentation "like in the old days". No amount of LLM trickery will free you from that. Once you have that source material, it's easy to re-shape it into an 80's/90's/00's doc format.

Negative example: I was looking into the German manual of my Canon EOS R5 II, and it is just fluff. Hundreds of pages, full of white space, telling me about features without actually explaining what they mean. Awful automatic translations. Their manuals used to be good (looking at my EOS 6D). But these days: oh boy.

I love old-school docs, and this was a fantastic read. But, I couldn't see the three generated doc pages linked anywhere. Did I miss something?

I'd really like to see the Win2K-style docs on REST, for example.

Edit: it was right there, in bold, too. https://gist.github.com/theletterf/0b8ee1112fbd087f3141d0cad...

> we’re not there yet, in part because of how much more powerful connected frontier models are

Is that why though? You need a beast of a machine to run a functional local model in my experience.

I think the big part is there’s significant sticker shock to buying capable hardware.

That said,

> weekend. I chose to try fine-tuning on two models, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct and Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct. At their size (around 8B) they run comfortably on a MacBook Air

Perhaps I spoke too soon?

Anyway

> I chose the Microsoft collection as the source of training materials. The collection contains out-of-print docs published between 1977 and 2005: more than 37 million words, covering old systems and SDKs

this strikes me as a very specific brand of 1995’s prose, spanning about 30 years. It’s a cool article though, so maybe that’s a forgivably clickbaity title.