But maybe not for long. When we get long-running AIs, the knowledge locked inside the AI's thinking might supplant docs once again. Like if you had an engineer working at your company for a long time and knowing everything. With all the problems that implies, of course.
That's the weird best thing about LLMs - there is finally incentive for projects to create documentation, CLIs, tests, and well organized modular codebases, since LLMs fall flat on their face without these things!
Yeah, I joined a project a couple of months ago, felt completely lost.
Last week, a colleague finally added for Claude all the documentation I'd have needed on day one. Meanwhile, I'm addressing issues from the other direction, writing custom linters to make sure that Claude progressively fixes its messes.