I used to envy and take inspiration from other workplaces where good [but not necessarily good-only] writing was respected; where a pre-read is really read before the meetings, thoughtful comments were made on it, etc.
AI workflows have obviously simplified documentation generation along with the code, but we had to work on our product/engineering practices to generate meaningful documentation, and not just vestigial/temporary documents in the process. On this particular point, we've made positive progress lately.
All of this!!!!
I still write docs so that I have them for myself when I invariably forgot what I wrote six months later, but, yeah, writing a detailed onboarding doc only to end up paraphrasing it to someone over Zoom is peak frustration. (Unless I'm doing so because my docs aren't clear. That is good feedback.)
The wealthy/owner class once again consume all of us -- here through AI -- because we cannot agree to work together.
You can step off your high horse now.
This is from almost 20 years ago [0] and the original stretches back almost 30 years now [1].
[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
I've seen where when AI is asked a question on how to use some particular feature of a piece of software it couldn't get a working answer. I read the documents myself and was just as confused. Then looked up customer tickets around said feature, and they were confused too.
I've taken that as a pretty good metric that if AI can't parse your documentation, your documentation is bad or wrong and needs to be rewritten.
Dev: Why did you run Y command? Doesn’t it clearly say in README.md to use X command instead?
Claude: You are right to be frustrated. I ignored it because “some generic excuse”. It won’t happen again
Narrator: It will happen again