[islandert]

I love that writing LLM-friendly docs is just... writing good docs. There's a ton of overlap between accessibility work and preparing things to be used by LLMs.

I wonder if an unintended side effect of this AI hype cycle is a huge investment in more accessible applications.

[emil_sorensen]

Exactly! It's very much garbage-in-garbage-out.

One surprising (to me at least) benefit of hooking up an LLM to your docs is that it is actually a really useful way to find gaps in your docs. For example, when an LLM cannot answer a user question, there's a good chance it's because the answer is not documented anywhere.

[thfuran]

What about when it answers with confabulation?

[mirekrusin]

Confabulation should not be stable. Ie. you can generate answer let's say 3 times with different seed / non-zero temp and if it arrives at different answers you can categorize it as confabulation - which likely means, again, that the answer is not present and humans will likely also have different interpretations.

[CamperBob2]

I guess then it becomes a threat to Google's business model.

[thwarted]

Just like how (it used to be) that writing good content would rank high in search results. But writing good content is hard. So we'll kid ourselves into writing good content for LLMs. Which is equally hard, but we'll feel like we're getting a leg up over everyone else -- who are all also doing the same thing.

It's unfortunate that people are more motivated to write for LLMs that are then used by humans than write for humans to begin with. Especially when the reason to use LLMs is because, on average, content is subpar making it difficult to find the good content.

Another case of Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

[emil_sorensen]

Fair point. Although good writing for humans = good writing for LLMs and vice versa. So I'm hopeful this new excitement around AI for docs if anything will just encourage folks to put even more effort into writing great docs.

[CamperBob2]

No, it's not a fair point IMHO. LLMs are arguably the best way we've found to organize and represent textual information.

A document you can hold a meaningful conversation with is a big freaking deal, far superior to any conventional resource when you're trying to learn how to do something new.

[ben_w]

My current working hypothesis is that the way to get the best out of an LLM (and any AI which uses them as the human interface layer) is the same way to get the best out of a human — because it's trained on humans interacting with other humans.

If you yell and swear at the chatbot, you'll get the response most similar to how a human would respond to yelling and swearing. I know the stereotype about drill instructors, but does that even work for marines, or is it just an exercise in learning to cope with stress?