Comment by radicalriddler
24 days ago
I wonder if anyone from HN would be willing to input their opinion into some features I'm building, which is really outputting LLM generated writing.
It's basically automating release notes and sprint summary's from existing systems like Jira and Linear. The target user is a product team, the target reader are business stakeholders who want to validate your existence. I've found this process to be stupidly time consuming for both our delivery manager, and whichever Dev they decide to tap on the shoulder to help contextualize tickets.
I feel like LLM's are a really good _summarizer_ and it can easily highlight if your tickets don't have enough context for actual people, if even an LLM can't write a summary with good enough context.
Idk, maybe it's a sensible usecase because you REALLY don't want novel ideas from the LLM in this case. You want it to tell you 1:1 what you did this sprint based on a list of issues.
I'm saying more and more "if you don't have the time to write it then I don't have the time to read it". Therefore my first impression is: if the process is so formulaic that you can automate it, then the content itself cannot be of any interest and the whole song and dance should probably be scraped altogether - think of a person asking ChatGPT "make this one-liner sound professional" and then sending it to someone who auto-summarizes it.
You mention that the target audience is "stakeholders who want to validate your existence", which makes me think that your target audience doesn't really care about what you actually did but rather about being heard. If that's the case then replacing the Delivery Manager (who is arguably doing a good job) with a machine that screams "I want to think about you as little as possible" is definitely a risk. It may work well to provide the DM with a first draft, though.
Disclaimer: I don't know your team nor stakeholders and I'm probably not in your industry.
Some documents are not important today, but they become _critical_ in the future. We lost a guy from my team and he was the only one who happen to know how to do this one process that happens every couple of months. Having that document was crucial. There is a lot of writing that is like that. I make my LLM write PR descriptions. It's not for me now and it might be for some of the reviewer now. But it's 100% for me in 2 years when I'm trying to understand why I did any of this and what was even the intention. But I'm a dev who tends to work on long lived systems where every once in a while you desperately need to know why something was done this way 5 years ago.