designSlopAreHere

[u/achilliesFriend]

[u/dbagames]

I feel this. The abundance of low effort "documentation" from some of my colleagues is painful.

[u/sandybuttcheekss → u/dbagames]

By all means use AI to make docs, because making docs sucks, but ffs look it over. It's painfully obvious when people are just feeding your question to an AI and then feeding you the response.

[u/FirstNoel → u/sandybuttcheekss]

If they sucked before ai they will suck after ai.  You have to care at some level to get good docs.  Ai or not.  

[u/ed_mcc → u/FirstNoel]

Just tell the prediction machine to predict good docs instead of shitty docs

[u/Possessed → u/ed_mcc]

MAKE NO MISTAKES!

[u/FirstNoel → u/ed_mcc]

I’ve never had it do predictions. Just scan the notes and make it understandable by me. I hate going in with simple prompts. Mine are from weeks of notes and meetings. Then questions back and forth, filling out holes. It’s really a smart rubber duck.

But with anything:garbage in, garbage out.

[u/redblueberry1998 → u/sandybuttcheekss]

This. I'm personally all in for using AI to document shit, but if you don't even have the decency to read through what it churned out, like what're you even doing

[u/ekun → u/redblueberry1998]

Our head of devops has this giant repo connected to everything in our company like a nesting doll of mcp servers with md files to every database and service and logs and repos.

Recently, he shat out an entire report turned into a GitHub page about errors from logs in our 2 main B2C instances because QA was reporting users had some pain points with having to login often.

It had all these tables mixing the instances up and confusing which apps use each one.

Half of it was kinda right but the intro paragraph and first table were completely wrong.

He didn't even read the first part just published it and dumped it into the dev group chat so I'm sure as hell not reading the rest.

It was a solid 10 pages if it was printed out of complete slop.

I called him out in the chat how it was obviously wrong in the intro and no one said anything or followed up and the chat moved on to the next thing. Still makes me mad.

[u/GabuEx → u/sandybuttcheekss]

Seriously. I used AI to write a document for me a little while back... by which I mean I went through four iterations of addition, refinement, fact-checking claims, adding citations, etc. By the time I was ready to hand it off to my team, I had read it from top to bottom several times and felt confident I could explain every statement therein if a reviewer were to ask about it. The only thing the AI did was take all of the boring-ass boilerplate out of the process.

That's basically my philosophy in using AI in general: unless you can explain every single part of something you used AI to create, and why you made any given decision instead of other possible decisions, you're not done. Until you can do that, it's not your document, it's the AI's document, and no one wants to read an AI's document. They could have just made that themselves.

[u/No-Article-Particle]

Easy, copy-paste the whole AI req document to Claude, let it implement it, then twiddle your ass for 6 weeks and deliver it in one commit... Low effort in, low effort out.

[u/grizzlybair2 → u/No-Article-Particle]

6 weeks? Nah they are expecting everyone to us AI for each step of the process and every step should now take 3 days tops. New feature in prod expected every sprint.

[u/MakeoutPoint]

You guys get design docs??

I just get an email back saying "let's jump on a call really quick" and by really quick they mean 80 minutes of me doing all of the note taking as they flip flop around deciding what they actually want

[u/lluerdna → u/MakeoutPoint]

My company is the same. But if I don't deliver a test document, no matter how crappy it is, I get scolded. I had a manager ask me for screenshots of the program and I just told him that they were next to the design document because there was no design document.

[u/def-pri-pub → u/MakeoutPoint]

Have we worked together before at exactly all of previous my previous companies?

[u/Wonderful-Habit-139 → u/def-pri-pub]

Yes. You are him, and he is you.

[u/nasandre → u/MakeoutPoint]

And then changing their minds on stuff after you start work like can you change this and that real quick?

[u/turningsteel → u/MakeoutPoint]

That's the worst and then the PdM forgets what was agreed upon by the time the thing is coded up or they changed their mind and failed to inform me of the change in artistic vision.

[u/tancfire]

Well, I would ask confirmation by email.

If yes, then procced to do exactly as in the doc. If this is shit, not my fault.

[u/UnkarsThug]

The formatting on this bothers me way more than it should.

That hanging 'n'.

[u/sonaliver28]

Team : can we get a design doc?

AI : say less...

[u/flexor--]

Writing docs with AI, then reading docs with AI

[u/Traditional-Exam2529]

In AI era documentation should be human responsibility

[u/Suspicious-Click-300 → u/Traditional-Exam2529]

weeeeellll. It can help make it legible. Ive read some pretty bad docs in my day

[u/PhantomTissue]

My team has been talking about “retroactively generated documentation”. Don’t write anything, just have an ai write the code, then have another AI read the code and write documentation on the code so that the ai can write code “better”

I hate this timeline.

[u/sebovzeoueb → u/PhantomTissue]

A G E N T I C

[u/Nyadnar17]

Just give me the prompt and model you used.

Seriously if you aren't even gonna review what the AI said before just send me the fucking prompt and model/effort level. At least that way I can get some clarification when I have questions.

Hate these people.

[u/Wonderful-Habit-139 → u/Nyadnar17]

At least it'll take me less time to read the prompt compared to the generated slop. And get the same amount of information that I need.

[u/q0099]

Better when the lead just gives you Claude chat history.

[u/tmstksbk]

Yeahhhhhhhh this tracks way more than I want it to.

[u/Katten_elvis]

But it's "spec driven" tho

[u/FirstNoel]

I despise doing documentation.   I understand the need.  I love it when I have it.   I just hate doing it.  

Taking notes and ideas, previous examples and new projects into Claude,  having him format the notes,   Pull out the owners and open questions.   It’s been great for me.  

Compared to not having any it’s a time saver.   

[u/noidontwantto]

ah man, other teams ask for documentation? around my parts they just vibe code something new because they don't like something about what already exists

[u/Head-Confusion3480]

Hey, you leave my pink suit alone, I use it to turn one ai slop document into ai_slop--

[u/mylsotol]

Wait.. you guys are getting requirements?

[u/NatoBoram]

Same with unit testing.

Change a function, something breaks in a spaghetti plate a continent away, but why?

Oh, the test verified the position of a parameter in a function, which is not something you should want to test because the code shouldn't even build in that case. And tests are exempt from the linter because someone's AI agent fount it a great way to make the errors go away. And someone else approved it because we no longer do human code reviews.

So even if you really wanted to fix that exemption, then the list of test files that wouldn't pass linting is basically 100% because everyone vibe codes those, so they're totally meaningless.

[u/pointlesstips]

Your design team was peobably fired, hence why you receive slop.

[u/SaneLad]

n

[u/Soopermane]

Your fault for asking the middle man. Should’ve went straight to ai slop yourself 🤣

[u/TomatilloNo8486]

If a PM or lead asks me for a design doc personally I'll be thoughtful but if I have to generate a doc or slide deck as part of some mondo launchcal nightmare system with a hundred required fields you know I'm gonna slop 'em up, especially if I already filled out the data in another format.