Some dudes would rather clean up documentation for AI agents than make documentation easier to read for everyone, such as people

@aburka @aly @skinnylatte I read a random project's skills.md yesterday and was like "Why do the robots get better documentation than we do?"

@skinnylatte @tante It's true

@skinnylatte People are difficult, machines are easy*. All squishy and sweaty, with different education backgrounds and different levels of English, god forbid other languages. Who would ever want to cater to them?

Why yes, I work in documentation, why do you ask?

*Machines are also difficult. We just pretend they're not.

@aly

If the agent isn't working well, take the CEO that purchased it out back and shoot them.

@skinnylatte

@skinnylatte Look, this is the only way that management will fund improving documentation at all.

@skinnylatte Same thing with APIs. Stuff that previously couldn’t get an interface for whatever reason: Adding an MCP-Interface is suddenly possible.

@skinnylatte
Wasup with GOG's TOS? Out of context somehow.

Unfortunately, I fully believe this. @cadey @skinnylatte

@skinnylatte Documentation is a fine art requiring patience, people skills and a deep understanding of what you are documenting. Rarely, it seems, is that understood by decision makers.

Someone objected to ‘dudes’, apparently it’s sexist so I’ll just leave this here.

In California, everything and everyone is a dude

EDIT: i don't think there can be sexism towards men in tech. that's a bit like all of the reverse racism people.

@skinnylatte I just wish Californians who call everyone "dude" would realize that the rest of the world isn't California

@skinnylatte

Dude? Dude. Dude!

Add a Californian, I can attest that the above is a complete and meaningful conversation.

@skinnylatte @aesthr

the rest of the world isn't California

I moved to California, but it's just a state of mind
It turns out everywhere you go, you take yourself, that's not a lie

@spacehobo @skinnylatte except this really isn't true outside the US and it's just another case of American exceptionalism to use the excuse of "actually over here it's neutral" instead of apologizing

@skinnylatte we are all united in a great web of dude-hood, all made of the same dude-stuff, on this great spinning rock we call dude.

@skinnylatte I called everything & everyone "Dude" once

Nowadays I tend to call everyone "Honey"

@skinnylatte they're seems to be this widespread belief in the us that there is a single correct way to say/do things.

As it turns out, things that are offensive in one place are not in others.

A lot of things that are perfectly normal in the us will mark you as really rude in Sweden. Likewise, there are things I do in Singapore that's perfectly normal that would get me ostracised in the us

@skinnylatte I'm encountering this at $DAYJOB. Not so much with documentation, but with tooling improvements. I've been pushing for improvements to some of our internal tooling for over a decade to make developers' lives easier, and not gotten much traction.

Now that those same changes might benefit LLM based tools, there are all the resources in the world to work on them. And I no longer have any interest in being involved.

@aesthr @spacehobo @skinnylatte i’m usually first to call out american exceptionalism but this doesn’t feel like one? every anglo culture has their own “the weird term they call everybody” that everyone else just accepts as a quirk e.g., australians and “mate” (which fwiw used to be masculine in that cultural context too). regional differences in language is ok.

@aesthr @skinnylatte @spacehobo Asking people "How many dudes have you slept with, then?" often highlights whether they consider it gender neutral or not.