this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
1327 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
85297 readers
3944 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not everyone enjoys reading documentation. We don't need to be defensive about this. We already have search that can trawl through a well maintained site.
AI can not only go through the documentation but also translate it to layman and point to the sources.
If it gives the wrong answer 1 in every thousand results, it is still undeniably useful. You shouldn't blindly trust AI is common place knowledge. And it's no different than doing a Google search for something and some times clicking into a result that is bad. The fact that that possibility exists doesn't change the fact google is "undeniably " useful.
I’m going to be straightforward with you and say that if someone doesn’t want to read documentation, they shouldn’t be doing the job the documentation is for.
I’ve been bitten by AI summarizing documentation so many times, these days I refuse to use it for that purpose anymore. It’s just not worth it. It creates a loop where it wants to try things that don’t work, walk back, try something else, repeat, and spend $10 worth of tokens in the process.
You say that I shouldn’t blindly trust AI like I shouldn’t blindly trust Google results. The difference is that AI is presented as an authoritative source in itself. Hell, most of the time LLMs don’t link sources unless explicitly asked for. And here’s the thing, if I have to go and read the actual sources, it isn’t doing anything significantly more time efficient than just text search, but it is doing it at ten times the cost.