Ah yeah.. I been chased to make documentation for a long time... but after fighting between meetings and bs to get the feature done, I don't want to write any documentation...
Its not like pms want to give time for documentation either...
For the life of me I can't understand this attitude. Assuming you're proud of what you're doing, writing down how cool it all is and how smart you were when doing it is a fun thing, right?
because making things is significantly more enjoyable than detailing how you made it
also 90% of the industry is autistuc
I AM the documentation! As long as I'm the only one who knows how the code works, I'm valuable to the company.
/j I don't even work yet lol
secret tip: make the code so horribly unreadable that the company cannot fire you as you're the only one that knows how it works
downside: you may also forget how it works
My ahh is not getting paid enough to document an ancient java codebase all by myself ๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ
That's a job AI can take from me every day.
What if we made a Rule0 for code.
Whenever there's a code, there must exist a documentation of it!
``` /// <summary> /// Method that prints a <see cref="stringโ/> /// that says โhello worldโ /// </summary> void printHelloWorld() { // prints hello world Console.WriteLine(โHello Worldโ); }
```
But this is unreadable...
what does the last curly bracket do? comment that please
These memes don't work anymore. Writing comprehensive documentation takes a few minutes now.
ah yes, i will plug my code into chatgpt, and paste whatever half-made-up nonsense it spits out into my documentation and the next engineer can read it and spend a few hours trying to figure out why the function described in the document doesnt work
im sure glad we have these sophisticated tools
Nah, you're behind. These things write better docs than people do. Few iterations, and done and done.
they really dont
you can tell when documentation is AI-generated because its half things you could gather by just reading the code and half just fully confident wrong information. the time you spend fixing the shit it spits out is the same amount of time it would take you to just bullet point the information
That's user error. It's a tool, and you're the author. You tell them what to do, and they do it. You review, iterate, done. If Opus 4 is giving you garbage, you're doing it wrong.
if im selling broken pencils and you complain that you cant write with them, its not a user error, the tool just sucks ass
Pseudocode is the documentation. As long as the variables make sense and you comment what each section does, anyone with code competency ought to be able to follow
This only serves as documentation for the micro.
You also need documentation for the macro, things like personas, architecture, infrastructure, communications and flow between different services and systems. Inferring this by looking at entrypoints documentations is pretty much impossible.
Documentation for the macro should come before the code itself, since it doubles as an action plan that multiple people can give their opinion on or act on before locking everything down in actual lines of code
Ideally, yes, but most devs won't, which is the point of this post
How many companies you've joined that had actual updated and useful documentation?
Most senior devs I've worked with don't even know how to write documentation
who wants documentation? ๐โโ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ
who wants to document? ๐โโ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ
Docs? Yeah we want them.
Writing docs? Nah, thatโs above my pay grade ๐