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by raincole 83 days ago
> I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools.

Probably negligible. It's not a problem you can solve by pouring more money in. Evidence: configuration file format. I've never seen programmers who enjoy writing YAML. And pure JSON (without comments) is simply not a format should be written by humans. But as far as I know even in the richest companies these formats are still common. And the bad thing they were supposed to replace, XML config, was popularized by rich companies too...!

3 comments

Programmers don’t enjoy writing things they have no good understanding of, and no good way to ascertain or predict in advance, how exactly it will behave. That’s at least partly due to poor documentation. Good documentation gives you a reliable conceptual model and makes you confident about how to use a tool.
I love YAML, so there is at least one weirdo out there on the internet who is bitter that TOML and JSON won
As a TOML and JSON fan I must say those formats definitely didn't win :). YAML did, by a really long shot too unfortunately
JSON is not designed as a configuration file format.