alt Hacker NewsI am using LLMs more and more to help me write docs at work, simply because I do not have time to start these docs from scratch. And it pains me so much that my writing no longer sounds like me.
This is fine at work, I guess. I'm not being asked to sound like myself. I'm being asked to convey an idea to an audience as efficiently as possible, both in terms of my time and theirs.
But I can't shake the feeling that the LLMs are eating my soul.
I still don't use them often to write code. Not that I have issue with those that do, but that sounding like myself in code is a part of my soul that I'm having difficulty giving up.
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I'm the reverse. To me, no one cares if your code has "your voice." But your English writing should reflect your humanity.
I am pretty anti-AI, but for once I am reading someone's complete and balanced take on things. Despite it's usefulness on the surface, I do think the lost of human personalities is tragic. Efficiency aside, it's the only thing that makes anything worthwhile.
LLMs are pretty bad at compressing ideas down to the level a smart human can. I think this is quite important for good documentation. Essentially the AI wont do a good job of highlighting the really important and essential details unless you go in and edit the writing by hand afterwards using your human intuition. I am not saying to not use LLMs to write docs, but I would definitely edit to expose the really important details as early as possible in the docs and leave the bulk boring stuff the LLM writes for later.