1. Immediate better output from the machine OR...
2. Being sidelined for career promotions because you spent so much time making sure documentation was accessible while everyone knows they can ask you instead of reading it, and you will answer.(reference: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-in-this-photo-and-i-dont-l...)
I don't view it as something I'm writing for someone else anymore.
Ultimately, I think that's helped me write better documentation.
Writing for an imaginary audience is typically harder than writing for a concrete one, and things you might think "someone else" might need to know - they either 1) don't, or if they do 2) won't read your docs anyway, most of the time.
* Sometimes, this prompt is enough for them to find the answer.
* Sometimes, they tell me a spot that makes sense to them, and I make it have the answer. (Maybe just by adding a cross-reference.)
* If they refuse to look at the docs, I can't help them.
You got very good answers to any original questions, though you should start by showing where you searched for answers already.
They hated "do it for me" kind of requests that usually looked like somebody asking you to do their homework assignment. I even got called out on it once, but could happily reply that I'm actually just messing with my system as a hobby.
One time I had a "do it for me" request.
I've run a sed command which appended sth.bak to every file of some type on, but accidently made it execute on all files on the system. They quickly gave me a one liner to fix my machine (a VM, but it took long to set up). However, when after fixing the system, I asked for explanation of the xargs command that was used there, I instantly got sent off to the FAQ with a number.
It takes a few tries before they internalize that they need to have a doc link before expecting my help. Once they do, I might take the next step to saying "here's the answer; can you update the docs so the next person doesn't have to ask?" And it might take a few tries before that sticks too. My goal is to eventually turn them into someone who evangelizes the docs themselves.
When I write peer reviews for my colleagues, I describe their attitude toward documentation. If that's "they refuse to open the docs, frequently wasting their colleagues' time", it's not gonna go well. If it's "they make nice doc edits after I ask them", a little better. If it's "they proactively maintain the documentation", better still.
Of course all this is for stuff that one could reasonably expect to be documented. Help thinking through a design problem or debugging their in-progress PR is generally a different situation.
People rag on StackOverflow for being mean, but it was a good training ground for developing habits that satisfy the social contract of professional spaces.
And this is why LLMs are great for looking up docs. It makes any docs work for any one as long as the information is present in the doc.
My boss was looking at them, but even the simple ones he was pointing claude at it and asked it to make a document explaining it. Then he'd send me the document and ask me to check if it was accurate. I added a line to the last page "this is an ai summary and may contain mistakes. Use the project readme for validated information" and told him it was grand.
His OKR for IC contributions on top of his management responsibilities won't fill itself.
That's why Usenet is full of posts reading "RTFM."
For some reason, instead of telling people to do that, which solves the problem, we just stopped writing manuals altogether.
Did it solve the problem? If so, why people had to keep repeating it everywhere the entire time?
Because people are lazy, or new, or for some other reason turned to asking questions of strangers in a public forum rather than making the small effort to look for the solutions on their own.
It's the same reason that Let Me Google That For You was invented.
Now, a really good human collaborator who reads all the stuff and thinks carefully, that was still better than what I saw from AI models at the start of this year. But I've also worked with my share of idiots, and been one too.
I'm not going to get into if *current* models can or can't reliably do any particular thing to any particular standard; previously my comparison was the same conversations with regard to video game computer graphics in the 90s always being "photorealistic" when they really weren't*; now, I'm starting to feel such discussions have the same vibes as Tesla fans insisting that "FSD-{insert current version here} solves all the problems and is a real breakthrough and the Rototaxi will totes conquer the marketplace this time for real bro, just one more version bro", etc.
or, in other words , if you want the thing to always read the documentation then make that a strongly highlighted point both in pre-prompts, active prompts, and memory.
When people complain about it, it's more often a gap between different knowledge domains and hard to measure characteristics of the environment, than it is an actual "you're using it wrong".