Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nrclark 366 days ago
I'm not sure about that. For whatever reason, I've noticed that my brain has a hard time holding onto ideas from LLM-written documentation. Maybe because LLMs generate the mathematically lowest-energy thing that they can.

I'd take poor grammar and interesting ideas over clear grammar devoid of real content any day of the week.

2 comments

Assuming that your ability to remember the content isn't a result of differences in the substance of the content, in my experience the stylistic issue can be addressed with thoughtful training/prompting and lots of Do/Don't examples.

It helps if your technical writers already adhere to a voice/tone guide, which can be pretty easily adapted/extended for automated documentation generation. If one doesn't exist, you'll definitely want to create that first. Some good examples:

Google: https://developers.google.com/style

IBM: https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780132101301/samplep...

Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/

Red Hat: https://stylepedia.net/style/

That’s understandable - the rule of “garbage in, garbage out” certainly still applies. I find that many engineers are capable of gathering the right requirements and content, but struggle with the polish/finish that makes docs more consumable - where LLMs can shine.