Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to seem sophisticated and thorough.
Documentation is an interesting use case. There are various kinds of documentation (reference, tutorial, architecture, etc.) and LLMs might be useful for things like
- repetitive formatting and summarization of APIs for reference
- tutorials which repeat the same information verbosely in an additive, logical sequence (though probably a human would be better)
- sample code (though human-written would probably be better)
The tasks that I expect might work well involve repetitive reformatting, repetitive expansion, and reduction.
I think they also might be useful for systems analysis, boiling down a large code base into various kinds of summaries and diagrams to describe data flow, computational structure, signaling, etc.
Still, there is probably no substitute for a Caroline Rose[1] type tech writer who carefully thinks about each API call and uses that understanding to identify design flaws.
Any documentation they write at best re-states what is immediately obvious from the surrounding code (Useless: I need to explain why), or is some hallucination trying to pretend it's a React app.
To their credit they've slowly gotten better now that a lot of documentation already exists, but that was me doing the work for them. What I needed them to do was understand the project from existing code, then write documentation for me.
Though I guess once we're at the point AI is that good, we don't need to write any documentation anymore, since every dev can just generate it for themselves with their favorite AI and in the way they prefer to consume it.
* They'll pretend they understand by re-stating what is written in the README, then proceed to produce nonsense.
Without that effort it's a useless sycophant and is functionally extremely lazy (ie takes short cuts all the time).
Don't suppose you've tried that particular model, after getting it to be thorough?
You don't have to play the game the same way to work there. But it helps to accept that others will play it, and manage your own expectations accordingly.
I don't have tons of examples, but in my experience:
* This worked in toxic environments. They deserve it.
* This doesn't work in a functional environment, because they don't have those bullshit metrics.
If you have to rely on those tricks, it's time to look for another job.
Feel for you or anyone surrounded by such others but it is most definitely not everywhere - that is used to justify your presence in a place of work you should not be
Over-fitting proxy measures is one of the scourges of modernity.
The only silver lining is if it becomes so wide spread and easy it loses the value of seeming sophisticated and thorough.
Maybe we should let/encourage this to happen. Maybe letting bloated zombie-like organisations bloat themselves to death would thin the herd somewhat, to make space for organisations that are less “broken”.
At the same time, I strive really hard to influence the environment I am in so it does not value content bloat as a unit of productivity, so hopefully there are at least some places where people can have their sanity back!
If your organisation is functional and you are abusing it by doing that, then you deserve to get fired.
