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Comment by hermitcrab

16 hours ago

>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.

    • Yes and no. In this particular case I'm not entirely sure what it was to be honest.

      The guy was pretty good at "dodging" work he didn't like in general ;)

      Overall the consulting company we were with was pretty good about keeping their clients/projects going and keeping our consultants in the same projects for a long time.

  • 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.