Comment by petetnt
21 days ago
Documentation is not just translating code to text - I don't doubt that LLMs are wonderful at that: that's what they understand. They don't understand users though, and that's what separates a great documentation writer from someone who documents.
Great technical documentation rarely gets written. You can tell the LLM the audience they are targeting and it will do a reasonable job. I truly appreciate technical writers, and hold great ones in special esteem. We live in a world where the market doesn't value this.
The market value good documentation. Anything critical and commonly used is pretty well documented (linux, databases, software like Adobe's,...). You can see how many books/articles have been written about those systems.
We’re not talking about AI writing books about the systems, though. We’re talking about going from an undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or one with 50% coverage going to 100%.
Those orgs that value high-quality documentation won’t have undocumented codebases to begin with.
And let’s face it, like writing code, writing docs does have a lot of repetitive, boring, boilerplate work, which I bet is exactly why it doesn’t get done. If an LLM is filling out your API schema docs, then you get to spend more time on the stuff that’s actually interesting.
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> Anything critical and commonly used is pretty well documented
I'd argue the vast majority of software development is neither critical nor commonly used. Anecdotal, but I've written documentation and never got any feedback on it (whether it's good or bad), which implies it's not read or the quality doesn't matter.
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Well documented meaning high quality, or well documented meaning high coverage?