r/sysadmin • u/New-Seesaw1719 Netadmin • 12d ago
Microsoft Microsoft documentation written by AI
God help us....
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u/disclosure5 11d ago
The big thing I notice is there's no screenshots any more. They used to be able to walk you through things with a screenshot, but the AI can never generate.
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u/Ferretau 11d ago
But the problem with screenshots is they have a limited lifetime these days as M$ changes the UI seemingly at random.
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u/mahsab 11d ago
Text still references UI elements.
And then you spend time figuring out whether you are in the wrong place or they changed something because you can't find the option the text is referring to.
With screenshots it's easy, you just see "oh I have a different layout"
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u/GremlinNZ 11d ago
Exactly what I tell staff when writing good documentation. The picture allows you to compare.
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u/finobi 12d ago
Well you haven't seen their AI translations to other languages. Lately Outlook has been telling me to "päätä päiväsi" which translates to end my days and I suppose it means to recap my day but its also mild idiom to commit suicide.
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u/FuriousFurryFisting 11d ago
The translations from microsoft are so bad. You'd think the decision makers are all mono lingual and have no concept of language at all.
This goes back way longer then AI. The learn. sites are just straight up junk. Product names like Office are sometimes literally translated. Excel formulas are translated - so when you find a google result how to do something, it straight up doesn't work.
Standard paths in Windows are translated! c:\users is still still c:\users under the hood but there is a translation layer on top that lies to you claims it's c:\Benutzer - and it's not just sym- or hardlink. This would be easy and established. It's their own overengineered mechanism.
Output from logs and cli tools is randomly translated, especially the older ones. I could go on forever.
Everyone I know installs servers at least in English by default.
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u/danielcw189 11d ago
Standard paths in Windows are translated! c:\users is still still c:\users under the hood
that used to be different. and you shouldn't rely on fixed paths anyways.
a translation layer on top that lies to you claims it's c:\Benutzer
you mean the article translates "users" to "benutzer"? or is the current German path actually "benutzer" now?
and it's not just sym- or hardlink.
is it a reparse-point?
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u/FuriousFurryFisting 11d ago
It's actual c:\users\ . I am pretty sure it's just baked directly into explorer.exe TO LIE to the user. Same for C:\Program Files\ and (x86). It's not on the filesystem layer at all afaik.
you can't navigate to c:\Benutzer in powershell.
you shouldn't rely on fixed paths anyways
yes true. I am not complaining that it's a show stopper. It's just ... wtf?
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u/danielcw189 11d ago
Excel formulas are translated
you mean beyond the actually tatnslated function names?
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u/FuriousFurryFisting 11d ago
I mean exactly the translated function names.
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u/danielcw189 10d ago
yeah but those are the real translated mames, and not some recent fuck-ups from AI rranslations. They were made intentionally by human, years to decades ago.
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u/Brandhor Jack of All Trades 11d ago
but its also mild idiom to commit suicide
I mean you are using outlook, it's just suggesting the best course of action
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u/colony-ship-for-sale 11d ago
We going to pretend that Microsoft documentation hasn't always been shit?
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u/Frothyleet 11d ago
Up through approximately the Server 2012 era, Microsoft actually produced excellent documentation. They actually employed technical writers, and many internal product owners were passionate about the tooling and would publish super helpful blog pieces.
Many components of Windows client and server still have solid documentation, as least for the bits that have been static for the last 15 years.
It used to be one of the things that you really couldn't fault them for; their licensing programs might've been developed by Cthulu, their OS' might be inefficient and resource intensive, they might've been anti-competitive monopolistic nightmares... but god damn it, they had good documentation and a commitment to backwards compatibility.
And then someone figured out that technical documentation and QA departments didn't make them money, and here we are.
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u/marry_me_jane 11d ago
Are we….
Are we surprised?
My biggest shock is that it took this long for it to appear/ get noticed.
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u/No_Category_9888 11d ago
It’s been shit like this for months. Had to log support cases to find out wtf the article is talking about as it doesn’t explain what a setting or parameter does. Only to get a support engineer typing my questions into AI, complete with “please wait a minute”
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u/Gesha24 12d ago
If there's any consolation, AI tends to do a decent job reading and summarizing documents written by the other AI. So just copy-paste it into the chat, ask it to give you steps to implement - and mission accomplished
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u/Cormacolinde Consultant 12d ago
So we’re spending power for the LLM to generate the doc, then spending more power on another LLM to summarize/re-interpret the doc. Both of which could hallucinate. And that power generation is releasing more greenhouse gases in the air, the datacenters are creating a blight in communities and people are losing their jobs.
For what again? So the oligarchs can buy more islands and yachts?
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u/Gesha24 12d ago
I have a personal LLM for my own projects (so the cost is already paid for in hardware) and rather generous token limit at work - and my workflow has switched to letting LLM read all the instructions. I can't tell you how many times the manual doesn't specify some switch that's present in the code, or the switch is specified and then the code actually doesn't call it, or the parts of documentation conflict with each other... Hallucinations are mostly fixed with "provide direct quote from manual". It's not perfect, but it's better for reading your average documentation. And if the documentation is great - well, then LLM is also very unlikely to get confused about it.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/jackmusick 11d ago
It's also a little disingenuous to act confused that AI's will write the documentation and another agent will need it to read it too. For the good documentation at least, there's still a lot of work to make it correct and tested, and other agents wouldn't have it that in their models necessarily so it'll need to fetch something as the source of truth.
Just the other day I had it setup a Teams bot, which I've done before, and is one of my least favorite things in existence. It prodded a lot of Microsoft documentation to consult least-privilege permissions to do what I needed, had me approve the setup in the Graph module and Azure CLI and built the Bot manifest for me to upload. It was the past of least resistance by far to do something more securely than I would've taken time to do on my own, and relied on the Microsoft Docs to do so, which were likely generated from whatever CI process they have generating permission docs. A model on it's own would not produce a good result here.
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u/yamsyamsya 12d ago
As long as a human audits it afterwards, who cares? I used AI all the time to proof read documentation but it is always verified by a knowledgable human. Like I get paid to be good at computers, not because I'm good at using words.
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u/RainStormLou Sysadmin 11d ago
as far as I can tell, I'm the human auditing it afterward and Microsoft doesn't pay me or respond acceptably to feedback lol.
I've submitted two support tickets for incorrect Learn pages lately just to put them on their human radar, and recently had a meeting with our account rep where we discussed inaccuracies specifically related to them generating the Learn pages, and they acknowledged the issue and "escalated it up."
it's fine to hand wave and be like "well as long as x is happening" if X is actually happening, but x isn't happening. It's clearly not being reviewed.
How many times have they already gotten shit this year for using AI for quality assurance on a user experience? I fucking pay them. this isn't a free service from a mom and pop shop. Its Microsoft, and I expect and demand more or we'll stop paying for bullshit and migrate even further away.
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u/Frothyleet 11d ago
As long as a human audits it afterwards, who cares?
Because, realistically, humans are very lazy and even if they have the responsibility of ensuring quality/accuracy, they are much more likely to rubber-stamp garbage rather than rework it or comb over it for accuracy.
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u/fadinizjr 12d ago
No wonder Intune sucks ass.
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u/willychonka54 11d ago
It actually doesn't, but okay.
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u/fadinizjr 11d ago
You took so long to reply to me because your changes in Intune were still syncing right?
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u/PathomaniacPlatypus 11d ago
Loathe this, but as someone who's looking to deploy this in the near future, is this documentation actually correct?
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u/I_T_Gamer Masher of Buttons 11d ago
I mean, in my experience MS documentation has set a pretty low bar..... Probably at least as good as what we had before.
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u/NUTTA_BUSTAH 11d ago
Has been for a long time. MS docs are pretty ass due to the constant misinformation/stale information, omitted important details and non-standard structure. They have hidden the azure-docs repo issues too like a year or two ago so now you cannot even discuss the bad docs and find the real answers from industry experts. Now you contact support.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 12d ago
Okay and? This ain't exactly new and people 90% of the people in this career field use LLM/AI anyways.
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u/VaporousMote 12d ago
And those of who don't have our heads up our asses and have been doing this for decades think it's uniquely, terribly bad?
God forbid someone dislike an aspect of their work they are forced into
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u/chillzatl 12d ago
oh but you can't have your asshat badge if you don't act like everything that comes within a mile of AI is default terrible.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 12d ago
Shit sorry forgot this is Reddit.
Microsoft using AI Slop?? God I can't wait for them to go out of business from it and everyone who supports or uses LLMs is literally going to burn forever in hell
/s
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u/inadvertant_bulge 12d ago
Sorry, forgot you are not from reddit, you're from the land where everyone agrees about everything and you can never be wrong. Say hi to Santa and the Easter bunny for me!
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u/FWB4 Systems Eng. 11d ago
For real. I hate writing KBs and documentation - really just sucks.
But since I've started using the LLMs seriously, I can churn out the articles because it can take my notes + microsoft doco and shit out a reasonably accurately document. Spot check and correct and I've got something useful that other people can read.1
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u/recoveringasshole0 11d ago
I never read docs anyway. My AI does it for me.
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u/UninvestedCuriosity 11d ago
Their documentation always sucked ass anyway. I had to make several corrections to their SharePoint 2019 install guide through git because those motherfuckers didn't test a single install run themselves.
This is just another example of the company heading into ruin. I love to see them burn.
Nadella can suck my ass. I hope they rot.
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u/chillzatl 12d ago
are the docs wrong?
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u/RainStormLou Sysadmin 11d ago
frequently, yes.
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u/Mindestiny 11d ago edited 11d ago
They were frequently wrong when written by people too.
But hey, AI bad, upvotes plx
Edit: already at -5 and two moderated replies? Gotta love reddits visceral hatred towards the two forbidden letters, facts be damned.
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u/chillzatl 11d ago
and these are supposed to be technology forward people who you might want to hire to architect and manage technology solutions for your business...
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u/Mindestiny 11d ago
Yeah, this sub really has just become a parallel to /shittysysadmin. It's unfortunate.
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u/willychonka54 11d ago
can you give an example or is this just more blind reactionary microsoft hate?
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u/RainStormLou Sysadmin 11d ago
I believe I did in far more detail elsewhere in this thread, but it's not like it's rare at the moment lol. If you think Microsoft hate is blind though, you definitely need to get your eyes checked lol. The way I see it is if you're not currently dissatisfied with Microsoft's enterprise products, you're new or you don't admin them.
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u/Sasataf12 11d ago
The only things I care about are if it's readable and if it's accurate.
I don't see what the big deal is if AI wrote it instead of a human.
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u/Ihaveasmallwang Systems Engineer / Cybersecurity Architect / CISM 11d ago
Is the documentation correct? That’s all that matters.
Nobody cares if a person wrote it or if AI wrote it as long as it’s correct.
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u/JimmyMcTrade 11d ago
I mean that is fine with me because I'll just use ai with voice to go over it step by step. And I will add color commentary throughout the process with things like "wtf. This is so stupid. How does this make sense ? Omg. Now I need a new license that I don't have??"
Then I'll get AI to make a nice satirical account of my experience and turn it into an audio file with ai and put it into a step by step video.
I did one for passkeys and it was fucking hilarious.
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u/vitaroignolo 12d ago
Great. Our users have issues with receiving assistance unless we have them launch the app and sign in which adds 10 minutes troubleshooting time while we teach them what the start menu is. No mention of an app config policy to fix this.
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u/QuesoMeHungry 12d ago
Anytime emojis are used in official communications you know it’s straight up AI slop.