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Copilot for Docs

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Re: Copilot for Docs

#22

Post by bertil »

blueboo wrote: post #15

What is copilot for docs? This page, rather infuriatingly, doesn’t explain! Is it part of copilot? A product? An experiment…? Copilot for docs is ___

An alternative to reading the docs; you can ask questions about the problem you are facing, and an LLM (presumably trained on coding questions, and RAGged to the docs) will give you configurable answers.

Re: Copilot for Docs

#24

Post by bertil »

This is an excellent idea, but it feels like an obvious application of RAGs (or a trivial agent to build with OpenAI’s latest ‘GPTs’ tool). Not dismissing the necessary and valuable work—it’s “obvious” in the way sleeping after a long day is obvious.

What I’d love to see is such an agent *learn* from the interactions with people asking:

* What questions they ask more often than other framework, and how can the documentation clarify that (explicitly or not);

* Can you detect when questions betray a naive grasp of the problem and when the person asking would benefit from dedicated training, not just a quick answer;

* Can an LLM structure programming concepts and suggest ways to describe a framework that would help people make sense of what each framework actually is?

Re: Copilot for Docs

#25

Post by chrismorgan »

switch007 wrote: post #3

I'm so used to links not being underlined, I tried clicking the orange 'Copilot for docs' about 4 times !

> I'm so used to links not being underlined

Here’s a user stylesheet I’ve been using for 2½ years (when color-mix() landed behind a pref in Firefox Nightly!):

  :any-link {
      text-decoration: underline color-mix(in srgb, currentcolor 30%, transparent) !important;
  }

  :any-link:is(:hover, :active, :focus) {
      text-decoration: underline !important;
  }
This means links get a semitransparent underline normally, and full-opacity on hover. I reckon it’s an excellent balance. Occasionally you’ll get double underlining due to people using border-bottom instead of text-decoration for some unfathomable reason, and occasionally there’ll be link-styled buttons that won’t get this underline, but all up I’ve found it pretty good as an intervention.

(I’ve been using this technique on websites I make since 2019, though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to use color-mix() on a public site, which only stabilised in browsers 6–11 months ago. My preferred technique there will be `:any-link:where(:not(:hover, :active, :focus)) { text-decoration-color: color-mix(in srgb, currentcolor 30%, transparent); }`.)

Re: Copilot for Docs

#26

Post by theonlybutlet »

blueboo wrote: post #15

What is copilot for docs? This page, rather infuriatingly, doesn’t explain! Is it part of copilot? A product? An experiment…? Copilot for docs is ___

Don't think they know yet either. Still early days, they're basically just dangling the carrot out of reach. They're GitHub researchers based on their Twitter.

Re: Copilot for Docs

#27

Post by bertil »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #23

So how do you actually use this? Or is it just a design/proposal?

Like many of those projects, access is controlled through a Discord server that is dedicated to more than just this prototype. I’m parsing and seeing things about getting CoPilot and VSCode to work together.

If you are eager to try something similar without dealing with a community, I’m assuming it’s possible to download the documentation from your favorite framework and start a “GPT” on OpenAI by giving it the role of a helpful coding assistant.

I definitely feel like there’s something to be done beyond the RAG aspect and figure out how to address the “other question” problem (you ask how you can do A, but that’s because A is your way to finding a solution for B, and there’s a much easier solution to B, but you don’t get the connection because you don’t understand the abstraction C). That would require a much more deliberate community to formalise properly.

Re: Copilot for Docs

#29

Post by ianbruton »

bertil wrote: post #27
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #23

So how do you actually use this? Or is it just a design/proposal?

Like many of those projects, access is controlled through a Discord server that is dedicated to more than just this prototype. I’m parsing and seeing things about getting CoPilot and VSCode to work together. If you are eager to try something similar without dealing with a community, I’m assuming it’s possible to download the documentation from your favorite framework and start a “GPT” on OpenAI by giving it the role…

Got a link to the discord server?

nvm, I found it on the top right of the copilot for docs page

Re: Copilot for Docs

#30

Post by karmasimida »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #23

So how do you actually use this? Or is it just a design/proposal?

Copilot for docs is a horrible name for this demo. It feels more like a search engine concept, the knowledge base is up to date, and the answer is personalized.

But again, the naming is horrible, I thought is was a Copilot just for markdown.

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