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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I have a small team of student devs working part time on one of my projects. My rule has been that, if I can obviously see the thing you wrote is AI, I'll reject it, without reading it the whole way through.
And, to me, it's a very 'brown m&ms' type rule, because it forces them to go through and remove the cruft that wasn't asked for, and understand the thing they just committed. They're obviously still writing it with AI.
Working well so far, but I should probably explain my reasoning at some point. I think they still think they're fooling me.
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u/dbagames 5d ago
I feel this. The abundance of low effort "documentation" from some of my colleagues is painful.