[marcosdumay]

Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.

You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.

[tightbookkeeper]

Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.

[marcosdumay]

It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.

[freejazz]

Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.