Posted by edent 12 hours ago
Create a new container or sandbox, copy in the git repo or point it at your staging docs, and see what happens.
E.g. as someone who doesn't "Fediverse", the intro section leaves me having no idea what an ActivityBot is or what an ActivityBot account is.
You didn't have to murder me like that!
This is my #1 annoyance when looking at a trending repo
Me: "hi support, feature is not available??"
Support: "it doesn't work in that situation. Here's a link to our documentation with two dozen bullet points about where and when that feature doesn't work".
It's as if you selected a cell in Excel, and the copy-paste buttons were missing, and you raised a support case with Microsoft and they said "copy-paste does not work if your spreadsheet was opened from a NAS share. It's documented here that it doesn't work: <link>".
That is documentation as a defense, instead of the company putting in the effort to make the thing work, they put in documentation that it doesn't work so they can blame the user who "won't read the documentation".
Paying people to record themselves using your software without reading the instructions might actually be very informative.
I imagine the ideal is a product that requires no manual. That's not always doable, but sometimes it is. Sometimes you can get very close!
:’)
It feels like like the AI agents can't help themselves sometimes, and the judgement exercised around what's included and omitted is baffling.
But maybe READMEs have always been this bad, and AI agents have raised the baseline?
As someone on the spectrum, this does happen to me with people sometimes too; I struggle when asking a question and getting an answer that doesn't fit the "shape" of what I expect (e.g. asking a yes or no question and getting a relatively long sentence in response that doesn't contain either "yes" or "no" in it, which means I need to do the equivalent of applying it as a diff to my mental model and seeing if there are conflicts). This happens less frequently with other humans though, and on average the amount of effort I need try to figure out what they're saying is a lot lower. This doesn't make it less frustrating when I get that kind of output from an LLM, but it doesn't surprise me all that much that it happens.
I'm sure I do this all the time to people too, though. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past several years is that I communicate in ways that I'd probably have trouble understanding in reverse a lot more frequently than I realized, even I still do the things I find confusing from others less often than most people I interact with. I'm sure a lot of people might find this comment to be pretty much exactly like what I'm complaining about even though I feel fairly confident at least in this moment that my point is clear.
I've have people in my life where I've got situation going to the point I got sick of it and just started responding 'That didn't answer my question. Do you remember what my question was?'. Turns out many people seem to invent out of whole cloth what your question is rather than actually responding to it. Seems like a whole lot of wasted effort. I mean, it's one thing to ask a yes or no question and getting 'it depends on X, Y, Z, blah blah blah', or just 'I'm not sure/don't know'. There have been far to many cases where I ask something and the response is functionally 'well you see, it all began in 1969, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth'.
LLMs seem to atleast actually respond to your question. The question might be phrased in a way which doesn't match what you intended, and the answer will be verbose and require you to wade through prose to actually find it, or it might just be wrong, but it will at least be an answer to the question you gave it.