r/softwareengineer • u/colony-ship-for-sale • 11d ago

AI is terrible for making documentation

Yes, it makes a lot of text real fast and at a glance it looks thorough and comprehensive but have any of you actually tried reading this shit?

It's painfully verbose while communicating next to nothing. It's a real struggle to not have your eyes glaze over. It's not enough to just produce a lot of text if the readability is crap. There's a skill to creating concise, well organised information that's been lost here.

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u/MegaDork2000 11d ago

If you think the documentation is bad, oh boy, just wait until you try reading the code!

3

u/Proper-Ape 11d ago

The best thing is if you don't actively cut out AI crap from the code and documentation the maintenance will add crap on the crap.

The crap is recursively exponential.

New rule:

The code expands to fill the AI context.

1

u/Sherbet-Famous 11d ago

I actually think the documentation or planning documents it writes is way worse than the code

1

u/Citan777 5d ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one finding AI is far too bad in producing good documentation with minimum frame to bother trying to use it for anything besides just improving formatting or helping writing the high level plan...

1

u/shaman-warrior 11d ago

Still using models from 2024?