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do we need documentation in the age of AI? (self.programming)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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recently I gave AI a task to configure a software and the software didn't have any docs of how it works only the source code. the agent went through all the files and generated a summary of how it works and why it's not working for my particular scenario and suggested edits to my docker-compose.yml file. I couldn't believe it since the bug was very hard to find and it used headless firefox to find why it wasn't working.

made me realize do we still need documentation of how a software work when a AI can easily explain it?

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[–] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)

This is just... objectively false. LLMs aren't miracle machines, but they're capable of performing certain tasks well and can be very useful in the right context.

I'm sure that you'll paint me as an AI shill incapable of independent thought for admitting this, but since starting a new job this year I've used LLMs most every day for software development tasks. It's excellent at catching mistakes and tracking down root causes that it would take me sometimes several times longer to find manually. The latter literally saves me days to weeks in the context of broad refactors, where there are hundreds or thousands of opportunities for me to make a typo or miss a case.

And no, I'm not blindly pushing "slop" into the product. I consider myself good at what I do and I'm capable of vetting every line of work that it does and recognizing when it's low-quality or misses the mark in some way.

Again, I'm not claiming they're miracle machines. They're subject to their own limitations and certainly aren't suited to every task. But to claim they can't be used for "anything useful" is completely disconnected from reality and, at its core, simply dogmatic.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    "I believed in this product enough to use it everyday, and it led to me believing in this product" has quite the sect-like thought process resonating through it.

    You believed that LLMs work, and you used them. And then, your experience as a "believer" is your reason to believe in them. There's no core to it, no critical thinking, just self-maintaining beliefs.

    It's like religious people believing in miracles because they are religious, then saying that the miracles are the proof that their beliefs are true. That's just circular logic.

    And with LLMs that have been shown to erode critical thinking and cause psychosis, that is even more meaningful.

    You believe that you can vet every line of work, and you might believe that you do. You believe that the LLMs make things faster, you believe that the result isn't worthless, you believe that it is sometimes less error-prone than you (which is worrying in itself), etc. And that would be fine, if these beliefs didn't have the incredibly huge amount of very bad consequences that LLMs have.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    This is so divorced from reality that it's frankly insulting. I "believe" in it because I've gotten good empirical results, not because I put blind faith into it. On the contrary, I'm extremely skeptical of anything it produces. And yes, I can vet every line of code. I'm skilled at what I do. I know how to do code review, whether it's written by a human or a machine. I can judge code and architectural quality or whether the root cause it landed on is accurate.

    More often than not, the work done by the LLM is effectively the same as what I would have ended up with anyway, except instead of taking an hour or two to step through all the layers of the application to find the root cause I get an answer in about 5 or 10 minutes. How do I know it's not slop? Because I can read the code it references, understand the exact reason that the bug occurs, and fix it myself and watch the bug disappear.

    I've been on the internet long enough that not a whole lot tends to get under my skin, but you asserting that I lack the ability for critical thought and just blindly trust the LLM output because I'm incompetent and don't know what I'm doing is beyond insulting. The irony is that you're the one applying your preconception to apparently anyone who disagrees with your dogmatic view. It's called post hoc rationalization: AI is obviously useless; therefore anyone claiming it has utility is doing so on blind faith and isn't applying critical thought because otherwise they couldn't possibly have come to that conclusion. I would suggest you reflect on the way that you've approached this dialogue, but the level of arrogance on display here tells me that you almost certainly won't.

    Also, because I expect you to point and say that this is evidence that I'm some rabid AI zealot frothing at the mouth to defend the tech: I have no absolutely love for AI companies and I don't have a serious stake in the actual tech beyond it being a part of my workflow (societal/economic/environmental concerns notwithstanding). I don't care about it any more than I do the literal physical hammer in my toolbox. I just think you're a condescending asshole for telling me that actually, I only think it's hammering the nails in because I've put my faith in the hammer and I'm too oblivious to tell otherwise.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    For what it's worth, I agree with you completely. LLMs are objectively a useful tool (and a fascinating technology - or rather, machine learning in general is), although I think the way it is pushed by "AI" companies is abhorrent in pretty much every way from environmental damage to intellectual property theft.

    I think open weight models are a good compromise. I have tried out a few quantized models locally, and while they more often make mistakes than proprietary models, I can really see their potential. I hope in a few years we will have capable open models running on (high-end) consumer hardware. At least then I personally could use LLMs with good conscience.

    And coding is such a great fit for LLMs since it is systematically verifiable and also often very repetitive. By following even the most basic principles of programming (TDD, design, code review, ...), you won't in practice care whether the code is written by hand or machine. If it lives up to your code standards and passes your tests, then it works! Thanks for your insight.

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