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by ender341341 316 days ago
Howto is super important to me, it's absolutely bananas how many docs seem to assume you understand the whole library and don't explain any surrounding context or how things effect other things in the context.

Especially bad in 100% documention requirement shops where you get stupid things like '@param foo - Control <foo>' where having some examples would be much more useful than a wall of those parameter 'descriptions'.
1 comments
neom 316 days ago
Is a chatbot kinda annoying then? Chat bot with a bit of a guide better? I presume you open docs ctrl F and search for whatever? Would you be annoyed trying to "search" with a chatbot? Tnx btw.
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benswerd 316 days ago
Our chatbot isn't trying to answer questions as much as it is to point people in the right direction.

People have made chats that are better at actually solving problems but the usecase we targetted was I have a question how do I get to the answer. This works better than search, because it allows for semantics to work, for example when someone asks about SvelteKit, even though our docs don't mention it, the ai points towards the Vite docs.

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neom 316 days ago
Yes, yours feels very good! I apologize, I was hijacking your post a bit, sorry for it. I happened to be working on a docs revamp project this week so it seemed like a good place to ask my questions, I've been trying to think how robust to build the chat function of the docs/onboarding etc. as it seems things are going in this direction, but I'm still cognizent of the fact that docs are as much an evaluation of a product as they are how to use the product. Anyway, sorry again for using your HN post for my homework. :)
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taoh 316 days ago
Hi, I'm working on something tackling this problem. Do you mind if I contact you for more discussions?
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neom 316 days ago
feel free, email in bio.
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ender341341 315 days ago
I definitely prefer it to to be text.

I'm not a fan of chat bots on random websites, but also my work is pretty regulated so as far as AIs go we're only supposed to use ones we have direct agreements with.

While I can just not put in anything protected I much prefer being able to point one of the bots we can use at docs and be able to provide it context for what I'm working on.

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