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by hugs 50 days ago
since the rise of agentic coding tools, it feels like we're in a new "eternal september" of people discovering ui end-to-end test automation.
2 comments

Also the merits of documentation and specs. It’s been eye-opening to see the subset of developers who were almost disdainful about writing documentation for their colleagues but are now tripping over themselves to do so for their clanker.
Agents read the docs. People don't. That's the underlying reason.
> People don't.

People falling all over themselves to write docs for their pile-of-linear-algebra-with-a-smiley-face-painted-on-it [0] don't read the docs, no. People who give a shit about writing solid software that doesn't get them paged at three in the damn morning do.

[0] The face is there to provide social-trustworthiness signals to engage the human pack-bonding instinct, natch.

Your sarcasm is unwarranted, because what I said is true and reflects the experience of a lot of people.

A decade ago I left a job and spent the last week thoroughly documenting every flow and code section of an app that I worked with, which was the core value proposition of the company. A couple years later I ask around and nobody even took a look at that.

People just don't read, and there are actually good reasons for that, one of them being that documentation is outdated in most orgs and the effort to keep it up to date is greater than reading the code.

> ...what I said is true and reflects the experience of a lot of people.

Wow. What I said is true and reflects the experience of a lot of people. Amazing!

That's nice, but if you write docs and people don't read them then that's clearly not a winning strategy in many orgs.
People are rediscovering everything. Some people have proposed using a more formal language to tell the AI precisely what code to write. That's a compiler.