Comment by godelski
12 hours ago
Why do I want length? Good docs are terse. Longer isn't better. When I read docs I want to get to know the developer and what they're thinking. I want to see their vision, not their calculator. It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
Just give your users and fellow devs some basic respect. I mean would you be okay with me just handing our conversation over to an LLM? Honestly I'd be insulted if you did that. Why is this any different? Docs are how you communicate to users and fellow developers
Concision is one of several virtues in documentation, and it trades off against thoroughness. I don't actually want to get to know the developer when I read a comment in some piece of code I am reading or editing, I want to as quickly and accurately as possible understand what I need to know about that code to make the changes I care about at that time.
Anyway I personally have asked LLMs to create more detailed TODO items for myself, on personal projects where I am the only human programmer who had laid eyes on the code. In fact, I do this frequently, including multiple times earlier today. So I don't take the idea seriously that using an LLM to generate a TODO comment is an inherently disrespectful thing to do.
I didn't say that length was a requirement, I was only thinking about why one would want to use an LLM to write a comment that is only a few words long, while the prompt might be as long as the (short version of the) comment itself.