Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other

Why make this about Claude? People are free to use any agentic coding LLM.

Documentation is firstly for yourself, secondly for your coworkers and/or users, and only last for AI. It is the art of writing and revising it that strengthens+questions+maintains one's understanding, so it doesn't make sense to have an AI write it.

I have large doc file from a feature and everytime i tell claude to do something (read it) it consumes a shitton of tokens. Better to have small focused facts for ai instead.

Another blogger goes down. Of course programmers have documented important software for each other.

Claude emits garbage, so documentation will be garbage as well. It doesn't matter, because everything will be rewritten and tokenmaxxed anyway.

In other words, the blogger now has a job where Claude is foisted upon him and he toes the line.

I've been noticing that too. "Hey, the normal documentation for our software of a crude API list describing what each command is and each of its parameters isn't good enough for the AI. We need to provide the AI with instructions on how to use the software to solve common problems"

Uh, you needed to do that for humans too. You just didn't. There's a reason everybody scrolls to the bottom of man pages ASAP.

sure, but those documents are generally just as useless because they're 70% complete, 10% indirect and 20% wrong.

Unstrutuced slop is no better at best, and much worse at worst.

Shocker, when something actually reads your documentation, you will write for that thing. When it clearly doesn’t, you don’t give a fuck.

If you have Claude write down notes, check them into the repo when you're done. It probably can't hurt and it might help.

LOL. It didn't even cross the author's mind to consider reading the notes himself to decide if they make sense.

AI is sending us down a path of anti-social behavior. It will be bad for us, of course, but AI is only as good as it is because it was able to be trained on info from github, stack overflow, etc. Without socializing interesting info, humans and AI will both suffer.

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tl;dr