My devs keep throwing Claude-generated writeups at me that look okay at first glance but fall apart when you actually try to follow the instructions they lay out
cryzinger on Hacker News
In the thread “The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality”, replying to this comment
Got in the way: Generated docs had logical gaps and inaccuracies requiring manual fact-checking.
I'm biased, being a software technical writer and not a dev, but at least from my side of the fence I think LLMs are no better at generating docs than they are at generating code, and might actually be way worse :) My devs keep throwing Claude-generated writeups at me that look okay at first glance but fall apart when you actually try to follow the instructions they lay out (which makes them useless for anyone who's not already familiar with the product or feature they're describing), and/or have major structural and logical gaps, and/or gloss over messy details in a way that makes the product or feature sound better but doesn't reflect the reality of what we actually built. Which turns into an ironic ouroboros where I then …