Comment by pbronez
18 hours ago
You have to start thinking about product as the entire provenance chain, not just the end product. That means nobody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference.
None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
>[N]obody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Doesn't really pass the market sniff test. Ceteris paribus, I'm pretty sure I'd pay at least ⅒ for a working but undocumented reactor in most situations.
>They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Unfortunately that is rather easy to game. Especially in an age of LLMs.
Never mind LLMs.
I'll age myself here but about exactly 20 years ago I experienced exactly this. No LLM in sight.
Boss wanted to ensure we document something for our client. Cow-orker that didn't want to spend time writing boring documentation that might obsolete him (we were consultants working at a client) created an awesome looking table of contents structure and pages on the wiki. The first few entries had actual pages that had content in them. Of course they were also very "introductory" i.e. "naturally lean" on real content.
I checked every single page. Almost all of the rest of them were entirely empty pages.
He got through with this BS and it probably wasn't the first time (I was much more junior than him at the point) and it won't have been the last time. He got out of work he didn't want to do and nobody was the wiser until he was very far away.
LLMs just make this worse but they're definitely not required.
> Cow-orker that didn't want to spend time writing boring documentation that might obsolete him
That seems like an upstream problem, if he was genuinely concerned about being "obsoleted" look upstream to why that might be the case, and fix it so people aren't looking over their shoulder worried they will get swapped out by the next cog.
1 reply →
I had a workmate do that when has was documenting his job after he resigned. Jira page and TOC had lots of section but they were pretty much all empty
Whenever I find similar I call them "Rad Docs" cause Rad was the guy's name
Is it though? I suppose it depends on how well things are reviewed after the fact - but I feel like there's a pretty big difference between a reactor and, say, a web app with poor documentation. I think if engineers wrote a bunch of documentation that was actually 90% blank (or nonsense) for a reactor, someone would notice.