Space Catitude 🚀I saw somebody talking about AI documentation generation, and after allowing my stomach to settle again, I reflected on the beauty of a more civilized age...
Remember "Literate Programming"..?
Veronica Olsen@TerryHancock I expect you read my rant 😅
Andy L.@TerryHancock So much of this AI stuff feels like it's being applied on the wrong end.
An AI tool that I can say "I need to use this code, please help me figure it out by summarizing the important functions." might be super useful. Especially for those of us maintaining old code bases with no docs.
But what's the point of doing that at the other end? If I can do that at my end, why would anyone imagine there's value in having the code's creator (who SHOULD be providing REAL documentation) run the code through an AI documentor?
You might as well say "There's no documentation, but here's the results from some google searches we did for you."
@TerryHancock It's like the people sending AI stories to magazines.
What's the point?
It's not even a question of whether or not the AI content is worth reading.
Anyone who wants to read an AI story can just go right to the source and cut out the middleman.
I can sort of see that. But you'd have to check it extensively against the code.
And it's probably still not going to give you a good idea of design intent. For that you either need the word of the designer, or a lot of insight, trial-and-error, and experience with the code. It's a guessing game.
@TerryHancock Of course all of that is true.
But my real point is that while AI output is not always great, the one and only major advantage of AI generated content is (or should be) that we don't need someone to make it for us ahead of time.
But for some reason, everyone is racing to do exactly that.