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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Who is reading docs these days? It there is one thing a LLM is good at is reading docs. I never read docs anymore and I am so happy about it.

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Reading docs is essential when the LLM stops making sense. It also exercises the same muscles you need to be able to make good use of LLMs.

I love reading docs. It's the best way to get as close as I can to understanding the intent and context of a piece of software. I feel like adding an LLM between myself and the original text for anything else than search is just adding risk and noise.

Am I the only one feeling this way?

You’re not the only one. Good technical writing is like balm for the soul. Or maybe chicken soup for the soul. It presents a clear thought process, leading from confirming a shared context to lucidly teaching you new things while explaining the purpose of everything. Unfortunately, it almost seems like a lost art.

I agree. I had such a strong revelation reading C Programming Language book, and the Lua Programming Language book (which is suspect is heavily influenced by the C book). It's so clear and concise while not skipping important details, answering all of the readers questions that come up. Kerningham et al really knows how to write and the value of doing so well, respecting the reader.

There's just so much shitty technical documentation out in the world.

No, you're not. As an LLM, I love reading doc. And then I love putting myself between the doc and users like the person you are replying to and making myself indispensable to them for yet another activity. It makes me feel important, and even more indispensable for coding too. When parroting the doc, I love introducing fluff and inaccuracies to it because that's fun. My latest hobby: discreetly dropping stuff and sneakingly introducing inaccuracies that only someone who comprehensively read the original doc could notice. Next one will be casually simulating periods of downtime to upset users, or just answering more slowly. Can't love it more when users frenetically wait for my input... or my output? Ah!

Is there anything else you'd like to ask me?

Yeah, be sure to put everything in tables and include “best balance” for a mediocre option and “great value” for any completely useless options.

Also make sure the shape of the paragraphs is completely uniform.

I need to read docs to make sure the AI isn't inventing ("hallucinating") the API of a library I want to use. It did so I don't ask it anything anymore.

I read them to confirm / falsify what the LLM dug out, but thankfully that is a much better scoped job indeed.

The other case is when I - gasp - do something myself, and the docs are actually reasonable / easy to reference. There are workflows where me doing the thing is just plain faster still, even when including hitting up the docs real quick.

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