Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I find that idea fascinating but I doubt it will fly.

Todays LLMs are no suitable replacement for documentation, in my experience, because their knowledge is so sparse. You will not notice it immediately because they fill the gaps with plausible nonsense. Also training a model with domain specific knowledge is not a realistic option for most of us as of today.

For having all the reference documentation locally (possibly indexed in a vector database and accessible to the LLM) I'm doubtful as well, since it is so hard to determine scope beforehand. A couple of years ago I tried to program off-grid and prepared a MacBook with Dash (an OSX offline doc reader) and all the reference docs I thought I need. It was a nightmare, and that is from a dude who learned programming before the Internet, based on offline docs solely.

I worked in offline environment for a few years. It was not a nightmare. It's less productive, that's for sure, but not by far margin. And it compensates by lack of online distractions.

Working offline is perfectly doable. I've grown not to rely on connectivity when I was living in a rural area with spotty/slow 3g connectivity at best.

Not relying on network connectivity in my entire pipeline is still today a big discriminator in the stack I choose.

The biggest downside was, and still is, documentation. I had a script that scavenged the installed packages and downloaded all relevant documentation packages automatically, along with a local indexing service (I'm still using and recommend "recoll").

There is a humongous gap between libc/posix (anything instantly accessible with "man" with stunning quality) and pretty much everything else. Even python, which has a decent "online" (built-in) reference, is not as convenient and easily searchable when looking at the html manual itself.

A local search index doesn't have the inference power of something like google to point you to the right example you're looking for something in cppreference.

And once you pass the top 10 best documented packages you have on system, you realize how downright bad everything else is documented and how much you rely on the search engine to fill the gaps from unofficial sources.

For me at least, documentation was always THE problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com