Regardless of reasons they tell you, if no one reads your documentation, then it isn't good enough. Good documentation gets read, as long as it is good. It sounds to me like you're disillusioned, if you're not responding to the feedback, even if you sometimes have to look through the reasons people tell you on the surface.

Which is true, in a way, the data put down as documentation can now be calculated in seconds, and documentation is just a cache.

Even in code documentation, I just need a function block that says "DO NOT PASS A VALUE OF 2", with maybe a deeper comment that says "yea the math breaks here", instead of a 5 page discourse on why you should not pass a value of 2.

Here's the problem I have. No doubt an LLM made it faster to write those docs, but did you fully spot check it for accuracy?

A lot of people aren't which I think is why the average joe hates it. These docs can still have AI generated mistakes which are easily glossed over by a regular human.

Another question is keeping those docs up to date...

Honest question, did you guys read it yourselves before asking the rest of the team to read it?

My experience with AI-written documentation is that, as a category, it contains just enough technical errors that more often than not I end up spending time running down confidently stated errors the old fashioned way: cross-referencing API documentation, reading code, etc. At that point you inevitably end up trying to get in touch with a human from the other team.

In other words, it's not because I don't know it's there, or I don't want to read it, it's because my priors tell me it's going to waste my time. What I end up doing is searching, finding the docs, and reading until I start to get the feeling of hallucinated factual errors.

I'm sure there's AI-written documentation in there where the authors really did a good job reviewing it, and I just didn't notice. But I've also had engineers under me lose weeks of productivity at this point because of documentation confidently presented, insufficiently vetted, that turned out to be wrong.

If you did check it for accuracy then I don't understand how you compressed months of work into minutes.

We do this to make sure people know what to ask for. The answer can be generated when they need it and it will be then based on the current state of things.

In 2021 I wrote a ton of docs for outlining our deployment and various how-tos, basically just got a "cool thanks bro" for my time. People never cared, I think AI is just a convenient modern excuse.

https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

A) this is what happens with documentation, in general.

B) as an experienced reader of documentation, I can often tell when the documentation is likely to be accurate. It's not worth reading documentation that's inaccurate. AI written things tend to be inaccurate and not worth reading.

You should be happy that your people know to ignore the work you and the boss half assed.

there's also the issue that people keep switching models when their quota is used up and so at first it seems to all be in order but upon digging in suddenly it hugely diverges in tone/usefulness if it doesn't just collapse in on itself outright; making diving into documentation even more of a hassle than it was before.

even worse is that when they bring back in the previous model upon quota reset it just consumes the information from the crappier/cheaper one and errors start compounding and you want to report it and they're like "sorry we closed our public issue tracker yoy have to join our discord server" and then you have to grab the attention of extremely unwilling developers who repeatedly insist there isn't a problem until you start copy-pasting their quite frankly shit documentation en-masse.

then its "oh that's a typo; the command is correct 25 pages/sections ago so why would you believe it in this section when it's obvious that its wrong here?" like it's your fault they can't keep their goddang slop together and parse through the glaring errors.

a manual should be able to be pulled off a bookshelf (or opened if digital) and allow you to flip to the relevant page so that you can refer to it as a reference and these jerks are hellbent on blaming users for when their jank documentation looks clearly hallucinated by 3 seperate LLMs.

it is beyond frustratung.

Apples and oranges