41–50 of 166 posts
Writing and reading docs used to be incredibly time consuming, and programmers often didn’t read them. Now you can all but guarantee a doc will be found and read and followed if it’s relevant. The ROI on docs is high now.
sure, but those documents are generally just as useless because they're 70% complete, 10% indirect and 20% wrong. Unstrutuced slop is no better at best, and much worse at worst.
> 70% complete, 10% indirect and 20% wrong I haven't had too much problem with information in summaries being wrong, but there have been times the LLM will miss the most important details. Then when you tell it, the response is "Nice catch!" or something like that.
When you say "you haven't had much problem" one can only assume you're _not actually reading the output_. In fact, like most things in modern times, one has to assume you arn't actually reading the output. You're skimming it; you're finding what makes sense and extrapolating that. This is the 70%.
The problem with non-deterministic models is that the output can't be deterministically assessed. You're harboring a delusion that you're getting real good output.
Most likely you're doing the baby extrapolation: you make it do a small, tightly scoped project and it's does 99% right. Just like a baby doubles in size in a year. Extrapolating, that baby will double again; but it doesnt.
Your human compensation limits does not extrapolate to the size and knowledge that's fed into the model and the context it extrapolates.
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Ahh yes, the documentation for claude. When someone created a CLAUDE.md, then changed some stuff around and when I later had to touch that repository my claude was hallucinating classes, functions and architecture that was already long gone! I just deleted the CLAUDE.md, since I had no mood to "fix" it.
Couldn't you have claude correct the CLAUDE.md?
1. Claude's productivity is your productivity, but team's productivity is not your productivity. 2. Claude will actually read what is written (well parse for autocompletion, not actually "read", unless you are under AI-psychosis).
A cheese-grater Mac is not a door stop either, yet look at it go.
Will people ever let go of being hung up on how exactly an LLM produces text, or do I really have to keep listening to this shit for the next several decades? As if being a program didn't already prohibit them from reading to begin with!
Tell me how you don't think a plane should be characterized as "flying" unless one is in "avionics-psychosis" or something. Surely you can appreciate how this narrow requirement for avoiding anthropomorphism and metaphors is entirely performative, and that engaging in them is in no way a sign of any mental illness.
And I get the performance aspect behind it, people wish to reject the metaphor to tear into the thing even that way. Or they come from a religious or spiritualistic background, and find the mere comparison insulting. But fuck it's so cringe. It's not news, and it's not insightful. Nobody who's ever had them shit out a page per second via like a dozen subagents, or utilized them being stateless and seed-bound, has any actual illusions about them being anything more than "just text generators". If they nevertheless assign intelligence, understanding, or similar traits to them, then clearly they simply don't agree with the anthropocentric philosophical insinuations performed. It's not some mistake or psychosis. Come on.
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Yup. Claude will rtfm. Most humans won't.
If you tell it to. Otherwise you might get the classic "You're absolutely right – I made that up. Let me look at the documentation"
I think this might lead to more literate programming. The main challenge with LLMs is humans understanding the code, which lp helps with. Also, it includes the relevant context with the code itself. Both of these things help humans and LLMs.
I've been trying it myself and I think it's working pretty well. The only challenge right now is that it is difficult to get models to output code literate style. The output from LLMs tends to open a code block and put everything in it with a ton of long comments, rather than create several blocks with prose in between. [A caveat is that I don't have access to SOTA models.] My plan is to add an agent that just focuses on the style.
In engineering of all kinds (or at least the ones I'm familiar with), nothing really beats calmly sitting with your thoughts, stating a problem, then getting up and walking around while you think about it, then sitting back down to write down a possible solution, and then asking colleagues to read it.
It’s all about the incentives. Unfortunately, companies often measure developers by their own PRs. An unfortunate outcome of this is that writing docs for other developers isn’t really incentivized properly (and with stack ranking, you might even say it’s disincentivized). Writing docs for Claude, however…
I've written so much documentation over the years, and humans always come and ask me questions that the documentation answers, but never ever read it.
Exactly. I recently found out I can use Atlassian‘s ROVO to ask questions against our Wiki and Jira. I now forward consultants to ROVO first and only if they can’t find an answer then I’d look at their questions. Saves me a good chunk of time. They never read my docs otherwise.