logoalt Hacker News

felixgallo • yesterday at 10:57 PM • 8 replies • view on HN

We as a society have to cut this low effort commenting out. The documentation is perfectly comprehensible. What action would you take differently if a given feature were implemented by Claude, or a human?


Replies

spuz • yesterday at 11:45 PM

If you've ever been tasked with coming up to speed on a system mostly documented with AI writing, you'll quickly realise how hard it is to trust anything you are reading. Even if the Claude documentation is 100% accurate, you'll never shake the worry that some crucial fact you founded your understanding on was wrong. It's a fast recipe for psychosis.

That's without even mentioning that AI writing can often state the what but not the why. That human perspective is usually the most valuable knowledge to get across in writing.

➕ show 2 replies
adastra22 • yesterday at 11:03 PM

As I said in my message, it would determine whether I use the project or not. I need to match it to my use cases, and if I find a match I need to know: is it matching because my use case falls in the domain of what the human collaborator wants from this project, or is my use case a hallucination that will go unsupported?

You cannot tell either from the AI written docs. I'd rather OP gave a rambling post about some problem he has in gamedev that led him to think a new language was needed, why the constraints are different, and how this will improve X, Y, or Z in his own words. Then I can infer what this project is and where it is going. Right now, I have no clue.

➕ show 4 replies
hackrmn • today at 8:25 AM

Comprehensibility does not equal correctness or fitness. As if that wasn't enough, or perhaps in most related manner, an LLM/AI cannot be held responsible for what it produces, by nature, especially considering the fact that a _human_ claims all of it as their own work, or at least take responsibility. Meaning that when a parable of documentation is discovered to be bogus, you can't pin it on AI, you go to the human and ask them why the documentation is wrong, and it's not a good look.

condwanaland • yesterday at 11:11 PM

Why are low effort comments not worthwhile but low effort docs are fine?

elxr • today at 9:04 AM

> The documentation is perfectly comprehensible

For a programming language? It's subpar and you know it.

See this for a language docs site by a small-ish team, but a significant effort was put into making it nice to read: https://tour.gleam.run/everything/

nozzlegear • today at 4:17 AM

> What action would you take differently if a given feature were implemented by Claude, or a human?

This one is easy: I'd read the docs if it were written by a human, but I won't read them if they're written by Claude.

fuzzythinker • today at 1:28 AM

I find your comment much much lower effort than GP you took a snip at. It's true that more ppl may align in your thinking, but dissing the other side's concern as low effort does not belong in hn.