Comment by rectang
5 hours ago
Haha, all the software devs who hate writing documentation are naturally finding their preexisting beliefs reinforced when the LLM is able to discern intent without docs. An LLM can be spooky impressive at reading minimized or obfuscated code, for example.
But this article argues that LLMs do better when the context is smaller — when it can understand the totality of the task with as little context as possible. And so having correct API-level docs is greatly advantageous. Anecdotally, this rings true to me — when the local context is good and clear, the LLM writes code matching my intent even when my prompt is sloppy and poorly specified.
Rejoice! The LLM will write the docs for you, relieving you of most of the work.
However without intervention, it will do too much and record absurdly verbose docs (similar to how an LLM will relentlessly refactor your code until you instruct it to move in minimal, incremental changesets). You will still need to edit down what the LLM generates.
100% agree. Most of the things that make development better for humans also make development better for agents… and I think docs are even more important with agents, because of some kind of multiplicative effect. The agents are coding faster, and the benefits of documentation are somewhat more pronounced because of the speed.
Wow its utterly impressive that people dont understand this. I create docs and maps to instruct my LLM and im always keeping my docs up to date..