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Comment by rebolek | Hacker News Reader

I write stories and tech docs. I'll happily outsource writing tech docs to AI. It would be better than anything I would write. I won't let AI to touch my stories. Their input is boring and cringy. So both things can be true at same time.

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For the tech docs writing, just give me the bullet points and I'll send them to the AI and discuss the bullet points with it.

It's more like, here's 80 pages of too much information, just give me the API in a tight section here, with an architectural overview.

Usually these tools are used to compress, not fluff.

Honestly, I'd rather just read the bullet points, especially if it gives people more opportunities to lay out hierarchical structure.

The AI doesn't know anything about the thing you're documenting except what you tell it, so what value does it add?

I write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.

I feel like these tech docs you're writing might not need to be written in the first place.

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