Discussion
Pure Danger Tech
smitty1e: I have found much value in reading the python and sqlite documentation. The Arch wiki is another reliable source.Good documentation is hard.
Akcium: I would love to answer your comment but I didn't read it :P
Animats: The LLMs read everything.
taffydavid: I read this entire post and all the comments this disproving the Miller principle
realaleris149: The agents will read them
makach: ..and emails
comrade1234: Despite using an ai while programming I still have open Java doc and other api documents and find them very useful as the ai often gives code based on old apis instead of what I'm actually using. So I do read those documents.But also, I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that sends rambling extra-long emails, often all one paragraph. If I can't figure out what he's asking by reading the first couple and last couple of sentences I ask him to summarize it with bullet pouts and it actually works. Lol.
armchairhacker: This principle applies to the following: - User documentation - Specifications - Code comments - Any text on a user interface - Any email longer than one line Ironic
torben-friis: I wish this was the case. Then we wouldn't have a minority of us deeply frustrated :)'Thanks for the doc, let's set a meeting' (implied: so you can read the doc aloud to us ) is the bane of my existence.
hamdouni: Yeah, i'm also surprised people just read post title and jump to conclusions ...
formerly_proven: Only because they are architecturally unable to not read something.
stevage: > Any email longer than one lineit's in there
coopykins: It's one of the main things I learned when working as tech support and I talked with users all day. Nobody reads anything.
krona: It doesn't mean they're paying attention.
simultsop: I don't know. Under pressure and stress all docs are ugly.
simultsop: until one day
taffydavid: Damn, I guess I didn't read it closely enough
funnybeam: I used to refer to the helpdesk as the reading desk - “Hello, you’re through to the IT Helpdesk, what can i read for you today?”
ekjhgkejhgk: Damn, this is thin content even for HN.Anyway, this is just projection. The Miller principle really should be "Miller doesn't read anything". I read plenty.
timrobinson33: tl;dr
sdevonoes: I think this is more true now than ever. Before LLMs, when someone came up with an ADR/RFC/etc you had to read it because you had to approve it or reject it. People were putting effort and, yeah, you could use them in your next perf. review to gain extra points. You could easily distinguish well written docs from the crap (that also made the job of reviewing them easie)Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/ADR and even though you can tell if they are LLM generated, you cannot easily reject them based on that factor only. So here we are spending hours reading something the author spent 5 min. to generate (and barely knows what’s about).Same goes for documentation, PRs, PRs comments…
ghgr: As a counterexample, thanks to LLMs many long-form articles that get posted with clickbaity (but devoid of content) headlines that I would have ignored otherwise now get "read" (albeit indirectly, with the prompt "Summarize the insights of the article $ARTICLE_URL in an academic, dry, technical and information-dense way")
sarreph: The irony.
sebastianconcpt: Proved that read is not causation of understanding but mere correlation.So if the read of the Miller principle is interpreted as read+understanding (it should) an interesting deeper discussion can happen.It can be invoked with a way more dramatic "None understands anything"
fmajid: Write-only memory
eru: I notice that with YouTube videos.
