I recently got moved to another team after my company restructured. Several repos have zero documentation. Most of those don’t even have comments on the functions. LinkXxxx(some args) like Xxxx to /what?!/ It’s also an over-engineered mess with multiple layers of abstraction. I can’t wait to finish figuring out what everything does and re-write (and document it) like a sane person. This code presumably had no AI involvement which I’d argue is even worse since real humans made these shit decisions. Don’t get me starting on their testing (and mostly lack thereof)…
Worker suggested using AI to write some documentation. Another coworker did. I immediately spotted a bunch of hallucinated shit. Good times. I want to know in my head what a thing does, how it works, and how it fits into the architecture. I can’t do that if an AI is just deciding stuff; it’s like a quiz back in school where I would memorize shit for about one week before 99% of it left my brain forever.
Sometimes documentation doesn’t help. My workplace used to be waterfall and we still have systems analysts producing documentation
One piece of work came to my team as “this calculation fails in this case and we can’t tell why”
Looking at it there were two updates in the documentation showing updates ten years ago the first fixing that corner case with the second fixing a side effect of the fix
Why didn’t it work? It was never built, or perhaps built but never merged
On the good side we have an excellent plan for how to fix that corner case, on the bad side we aren’t funded to do that amount of work so we have to half arse a solution
I recently got moved to another team after my company restructured. Several repos have zero documentation. Most of those don’t even have comments on the functions.
LinkXxxx(some args)like Xxxx to /what?!/ It’s also an over-engineered mess with multiple layers of abstraction. I can’t wait to finish figuring out what everything does and re-write (and document it) like a sane person. This code presumably had no AI involvement which I’d argue is even worse since real humans made these shit decisions. Don’t get me starting on their testing (and mostly lack thereof)…Worker suggested using AI to write some documentation. Another coworker did. I immediately spotted a bunch of hallucinated shit. Good times. I want to know in my head what a thing does, how it works, and how it fits into the architecture. I can’t do that if an AI is just deciding stuff; it’s like a quiz back in school where I would memorize shit for about one week before 99% of it left my brain forever.
Sometimes documentation doesn’t help. My workplace used to be waterfall and we still have systems analysts producing documentation
One piece of work came to my team as “this calculation fails in this case and we can’t tell why”
Looking at it there were two updates in the documentation showing updates ten years ago the first fixing that corner case with the second fixing a side effect of the fix
Why didn’t it work? It was never built, or perhaps built but never merged
On the good side we have an excellent plan for how to fix that corner case, on the bad side we aren’t funded to do that amount of work so we have to half arse a solution