[sgc]

I am not saying it doesn't matter because it does, but how much does it matter now since we can get documentation on the fly?

I started working on something today I hadn't touched in a couple years. I asked for a summary of code structure, choices I made, why I made them, required inputs and expected outputs. Of course it wasn't perfect, but it was a very fast way to get back up to speed. Faster than picking through my old code to re-familiarize myself for sure.

[codingdave]

We cannot get full documentation on the fly, though. We can get "what this does" level of documentation for the system that AI is looking at. And if all you are doing is writing some code, maybe that is enough. But AI cannot offer the bigger picture of where it fits in the overall infrastructure, nor the business strategy. It cannot tell you why technical debt was chosen on some feature 5-10 years ago. And those types of documentation are far more important these days, as people write less of the code by hand.

This is the same discussion that goes round ad nauseum about comments. Nobody needs comments to tell us what the code does. We need comments to explain why choices were made.