Comment by sourdoughness
21 days ago
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.
A much better options is to use docstrings[0] and a tool like doxygen to extract an API reference. Domain explanations and architecture can be compiled later from design and feature docs.
A good example of the kind of result is something like the Laravel documentation[1] and its associated API reference[2]. I don't believe AI can help with this.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docstring
[1]: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x
[2]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/12.x/