Ask HN: Does documentation for programming languages matter anymore?

[Gtex555]

So does documentation for programming languages matter anymore (at a the lower levels)? Sure if a programming language has better documentation the LLM can understand it better and give better suggestions but on a personal level if I'm learning a language any decent LLM should be enough right?

[billconan]

I don't think the purpose of documentation is to explain the what, but the why.

As an example, in a device driver project, we need to send no-ops to the hardware to slow it down, in order to alleviate a hardware overheating issue.

Can AI or even human realize the reason by looking at no-ops?

[JohnFen]

I think documentation remains essential. Ignoring issues about the quality of LLM responses, the conversational nature of using them doesn't lend itself well to some of the needs that documenation fills.

[creer]

I don't understand, (eventually) you can read the documentation yourself or you can chat with a bot / agent that has read the documentation. Either way, not much happens if there is no documentation, no? (Never mind, that launching with minimal documentation is still a thing even for giant projects... - and a good reason to drop them as soon as we notice.)