Sounds great, but what if the hardest thing is impossible for unknown reasons? I think you need a sort of on-ramp of steadily harder things so that if you fail at one thing, it's not the only thing you've ever done, and you still retain enough credibility for people to support you while you try again or try something similarly hard.
Unfortunately, the safety net necessary to support oneself while they do the hardest thing isn't guaranteed.
Yeah, because Claude is willing to read other documentation in order to understand mine. When I'm asked to write docs for humans I have to work four times as hard because 3/4 of that work is getting the audience up to speed just so I can start documenting the actual thing. And then they don't read it and ask me to explain it to a meeting anyhow.
Strongly agree with this. Long before 2022 (ChatGPT), I remember saying to someone at work, "We need to build a reading culture for a writing culture to thrive."
I used to envy and take inspiration from other workplaces where good [but not necessarily good-only] writing was respected; where a pre-read is really read before the meetings, thoughtful comments were made on it, etc.
AI workflows have obviously simplified documentation generation along with the code, but we had to work on our product/engineering practices to generate meaningful documentation, and not just vestigial/temporary documents in the process. On this particular point, we've made positive progress lately.
> And then they don't read it and ask me to explain it to a meeting anyhow.
All of this!!!!
I still write docs so that I have them for myself when I invariably forgot what I wrote six months later, but, yeah, writing a detailed onboarding doc only to end up paraphrasing it to someone over Zoom is peak frustration. (Unless I'm doing so because my docs aren't clear. That is good feedback.)
Most of the internal docs I write are basically pointing people to canonical docs that already exist, and sometimes also summarizing docs that already exist.
I bet a huge amount of that is on your head, or if it is factual, a function of a toxic work culture where people are primarily incentivized to "outperform one another" rather than arrive at collaborative solutions.
The wealthy/owner class once again consume all of us -- here through AI -- because we cannot agree to work together.
This was also my first thought when reading the title: because Claude is a tool you use and co-workers are either competitors or people preferably dependent.. an anti-pattern and not good culture but sadly the norm.
That's not to say that the help-vampires the parent mentions don't exist. I think we culturally are afraid of pushing back against them: telling them to RTFM and then come back.
No. It is a well established fact that the majority of users will not read documentation of any kind. This is not a new observation, it's been a meme in developer circles from the first day computers showed up in the workplace.
In my defense. (1) I can't find the docs (2) I can't find the relevant docs (3) after having read several irrelevant docs they still don't answer my question but the question I need answering isn't actually in the docs.
I would add on that if AI doesn't seem to understand your docs then humans are going to have an even harder time.
I've seen where when AI is asked a question on how to use some particular feature of a piece of software it couldn't get a working answer. I read the documents myself and was just as confused. Then looked up customer tickets around said feature, and they were confused too.
I've taken that as a pretty good metric that if AI can't parse your documentation, your documentation is bad or wrong and needs to be rewritten.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
Your google account still works for drive if you switch from gmail to fastmail or proton or whatever. If you associate it with a domain you control you can even move the same email address between providers.
It would be very nice if we had a system where the money was backed by some kind of consensus about quality of life. But what we have has more to do with compulsion.
The more dollars there are, the more deeply in debt we are. If these were interpersonal debts where we all owe the dollars to each other such that they go away when whatever promise is eventually kept, that would be a tight knit society. But instead we're all indebted to the banks, so instead we have a lot of collateral at risk, and a lot of uncertainty about whether it's a stable arrangement.
If there isn't enough money to satisfy the asking prices set by the owners of these abstractions, then we can always go deeper into debt until there is. Or we could have a debt jubilee and let the prices re-settle to something more in tune with reality.
I agree that it has some resemblance, but the striking thing about NP-complete problems is that an efficient solution to any of them is an efficient solution to all of them, which makes it worth trying exceptionally hard to find one.
It could be that whatever lackluster expertise you can squeeze out of an LLM is good enough to discourage investment in the real thing since unlike NP-complete problems, expertise isn't generalizable.
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