AI documentation fails in a familiar way: no editor, no ownership, and just enough coherence to pass inspection. Prompts are written like rituals. The outputs comply, but one is accountable.
Dropped into midstream client work, I use AI-assisted documentation as a tool for reduction. Feed it the accumulated mass, wikis, repositories, shared drives, transcripts, tales of lore, and it produces documentation-shaped objects. Design docs. READMEs. Runbooks. They resemble something like understanding, but not exactly. Humans remain necessary to reject outputs that are precise and useless, to supply context that the system cannot derive, and to impose standards that it cannot recognize. AI can't do that; most humans can once somebody does the grunt work. Then, some fool finds a way to integrate the AI-assisted documentation into a process and then calls it from Acme, naming it "Tales From The Chords." Sorry for the off-topic in-thread post. -- Mat Kovach [email protected] On Sat, May 2, 2026, at 05:58, [email protected] wrote: > I also have Brian's book and found it useful when digging into Inferno. Not > that I have the time to do much of that these days. > > As for AI-assisted documentation, I'm still skeptical. I'm talking generally > here. If people want to use tools to write documentation, that's fine, but my > experience has been that you really need to verify that the output reflects > what it is supposed to describe. If you asked a person to write > documentation, you would still want to check what they wrote on at least a > superficial level. I've worked with managers who don't even do that, and they > weren't good managers. > > Not looking to demotivate anyone with my opinions. > > *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans> + participants > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription> Permalink > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf9a9e5697dfa63e0-Me893418a34c3662a50ed9377> ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf9a9e5697dfa63e0-Ma10e629755db8454be7d8543 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
