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?

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    4·
    1 day ago

    There’s a lot of people here that clearly haven’t ever tried what you’re describing op (or maybe tried recent AI at all).

    I have. I think it’s a totally valid question. Sometimes when I’m getting AI to do stuff it reads the docs and then tries stuff anyway and finds the docs are wrong.

    I also often use AI to generate docs for undocumented things.

    But I think it does still make sense to have docs for a few reasons:

    1. They show the intent explicitly, rather than having it inferred. Same reason anything explicit is better than implicit, e.g. static types.
    2. It spends fewer tokens to read docs than to constantly reverse engineer software.
    3. It’s also quicker.
    4. Sometimes you do still want to understand the thing…