But you see, developers have been self spamming their code with obvious, misleading, and/or wrong comments for decades. Especially with those pesky “everything must have a doc-comment” linters. Think of all the time ChatGPT will save doing it for them!

I have actually been using chatGPT do write jsdocs for me.

It mostly only need the function and the type definitions (typescript) and it is usually very good at writing them and it does save me time.

your pessimism is hardly unwarranted. this will lead to rather lousy code documentation, and might be misused by folks. but on the other hand, i look at this as something that will be effective as a "summarizer" of sorts where it describes already written code with lack of/poor documentation.

It would be chef’s kiss perfect if another LLM did the code review.

maybe a "code formatter" that just asks an LLM if it can rewrite this code, but pretty?

who reads code bases anyway

People have been doing that for a long time. It's usually a form of malicious compliance to "document everything" policies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4ktp12/my_...

Just becasue people are doing that for a long time it doesn't mean we should make it more efficient.

Just because we shouldn’t doesn’t mean people won’t pay for the service.

My “Well done” was not meant sarcastically!

I doubt an LLM is more efficient than previous documentation generators.

Wait. This is already an industry?!?

Code is the ultimate reference for understanding a project, while documentation is often neglected, outdated, or incorrect. It can also be difficult to keep up to date.

An LLM may not fully comprehend the code like the original author, but it can offer a different perspective that may be valuable. The only argument I've seen against LLMs is that it may encourage laziness, but this is a flawed argument similar to those made against the printing press, which was said to make people illiterate.

As a reader of the docs: does it require discipline to refer back to the code when needed. Yes, but this is no different from the discipline required to write documentation in the first place. But with a key difference, the discipline is shifted from author to reader.

This just begs the question… why not generate the docs when someone reads the code instead? Why bother generating a bunch of half assed docs today when you can wait and interrogate the code in a much more natural and fluid way using the same LLM when it matters?

SEO. When you ask an LLM “What’s a good library/tool I can use to accomplish X?” The ones with some documentation already attached will rise to the surface and make it easier for the consuming LLM to generate code samples for.

1. It's cheaper

2. Everyone can see the same thing

3. It can be utilized for search

4. You can do both

Perhaps most importantly

5. It can be reviewed

Because not everyone will have access to LLM technology, and even if they do, your project might not always be used in a setting where access is technically feasible.

In can help to give an initial overview over a code base, its structure and contained functionality (with the usual risk of inaccuracies and fabulations), but it can’t supply the rationale and contextual information that good documentation provides, which can’t be derived from just the code. It also can’t distinguish between what is an implementation detail and what is part of an implicit interface contract.

He now can use gpt to generate code, comments, comments in code reviews, and work on 3 jobs simultaneously.

Overemployment is ruining America.