alt Hacker NewsYeah, because Claude is willing to read other documentation in order to understand mine. When I'm asked to write docs for humans I have to work four times as hard because 3/4 of that work is getting the audience up to speed just so I can start documenting the actual thing. And then they don't read it and ask me to explain it to a meeting anyhow.
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> And then they don't read it and ask me to explain it to a meeting anyhow.
All of this!!!!
I still write docs so that I have them for myself when I invariably forgot what I wrote six months later, but, yeah, writing a detailed onboarding doc only to end up paraphrasing it to someone over Zoom is peak frustration. (Unless I'm doing so because my docs aren't clear. That is good feedback.)
I bet a huge amount of that is on your head, or if it is factual, a function of a toxic work culture where people are primarily incentivized to "outperform one another" rather than arrive at collaborative solutions.
The wealthy/owner class once again consume all of us -- here through AI -- because we cannot agree to work together.
Strongly agree with this. Long before 2022 (ChatGPT), I remember saying to someone at work, "We need to build a reading culture for a writing culture to thrive."
I used to envy and take inspiration from other workplaces where good [but not necessarily good-only] writing was respected; where a pre-read is really read before the meetings, thoughtful comments were made on it, etc.
AI workflows have obviously simplified documentation generation along with the code, but we had to work on our product/engineering practices to generate meaningful documentation, and not just vestigial/temporary documents in the process. On this particular point, we've made positive progress lately.