alt Hacker NewsThis paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?
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I'm starting to see pushback for this. I know a Product Manager that was fired for padding his documentation with AI to the point there were mistakes and wasted work due to AI hallucinations.
I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai.
See also this video from Nate B Jones: https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=WUK2WJTXvKAWKD0r
I've seen some of this as well. It's OK to send me an agentic screed if it's just going to be consumed by my agent, but I want a nicely written summary up top that was made by you... I'm starting to value poor grammar, typos, and other signs of legitimacy
What I find particularly irritating is that you can actually prompt the fcking AI to be short.
> Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible.
It takes more effort to be brief, even for humans. Good documentation writers were always brief.
Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply.
/rant