[jdw64]

I personally think what has become cheaper is the cost of documentation. Gen AI documentation is flat and explicit, so I sometimes find it more convenient than human-written documentation, especially for APIs. (Many people criticize AI's distinctive writing style, but I don't really care about style in manuals.)

Human-written API documentation, on the other hand, tends to be inconsistent in quality

[efitz]

This is part of it but the models are REALLY good at reverse engineering. With the Bluetooth printer I was trying to get to work without a vendor app, it built a python app to handle protocol encode/decode and poking the device, and it reversed the driver provided by the vendor to figure out how the vendor was using the device, and so forth. Wi to the LoRa devices we set up an SDR to intercept the signal, did scanning until we found the device, but ultimately failed because we didn’t know the signal hopping algorithm. I have also reversed a Bluetooth peripheral with Claude to figure out how the vendor was setting the device settings, and was able to get the device to work without the vendor software. That was wild- Apple Developer has a profile you can download and install that will give you monitor access to the Bluetooth stack; it was amazing.

So I use AI for exactly what Simon’s post discusses, and am thrilled to be able to rid myself of crap software written by device vendors, and make the devices work without my stuff.

[lnsru]

Everything human made is inconsistent. I can tell just from an error in schematic which of my former colleagues created that schematic. Everyone of them had training on the job and have thrir signature errors. That’s why automation is crucial for quality control.

[jdw64]

Hardware SDKs and API manuals are terrible. Personally, I found the camera ones (e.g., Canon) especially bad.

[mvATM99]

Cheaper to write definitely, no so much cheaper to read. AI generated docs tend to be so annoyingly verbose if not reined in during prompting.

But well, any documentation is good when a human would've written zero docs

[jdw64]

Rather than that, the quality of human-written documentation is just too inconsistent. Because it's not written by a single person.

AI's verbosity is definitely a problem, but I think it's something you can just check once more. Of course, opinions vary.