> It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition.
Then the second half
> A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time.
Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked well for us who grew up pre-Internet is not working well for "web natives".
That’s great, but gegenstand just means object, and that definition of object is part of English, e.g. “The object of having this talk is to learn about how we can do better.”
You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.
I have been interpretting the new "we need to write documentation for LLMs!!!" trend to REALLY mean "oh damn, we don't have ANY concise and navigable documentation at all..." (combined with the fact you can't just ignore this fact like when onboarding a human over weeks or months - LLMs have no capability to create long-term memories _except_ to create documentation artifacts to look up later).
In the end I'm hopeful about this because it means there will be more concise and navigable documentation for me to refer to (though I might be slightly offended to be reading the AGENTS.md instead of the README.md, lol)
Yeah, I had a PM raise this concern to me and I pointed out that almost all of the advice for "publishing for LLMs" (using descriptive link text, including context and prerequisites for steps, testing and validating code examples, publishing single-page docs formats, generating consistent structure for documentation types using semantic HTML) was already in our documentation standards for people as an audience, and in several cases enforced by tools like Vale, DocDetective, and in-house CI integrations.
Adding an AGENTS.md was as easy as running our single-page static HTML output through Pandoc with a separate context header section stapled to the frontmatter.
My fiancée recently remarked that she'd been doing more writing on paper because it made her more productive. She theorized that she takes an editor's mindset in the face of WYSIWYG renditions of her spelling mistakes. The same goes for her design work. The industry tools make it too easy to recognize "wrong" as it's happening. That sounds like a singing endorsement of these tools, but our experience working with lower-tech tools has informed a different conclusion. You're not being "helped" to see "wrong" in what you do, you're being cut off. Your generative, creative mode is being inhibited.
In English I guess we have understand and withstand. And used to have words like counterstand and overstand.
While thinking about this I had a curious thought that maybe the word "against" derives not just from "agegn" but from a two word phrase "agegn standan". Google is not helpful. Claude AI suggests that the "st" ending actually developed later, likely through analogy with other prepositions ending in "-st" like "amongst" and "whilst."
BTW, this also kind of works in English: we notice objects around us, because they object to our intentions, just for their inert nature. It's their resistance (German: Widerstand), which brings them to our attention. (Objects are pretty much passive-aggressive. ;-) )
I find it mildly amusing that the article makes the following point regarding "Gegenstand":
> Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something.
...while many words in Germany are just "stuff" (Zeug). A plane is a Fly-Stuff (Flugzeug). A lighter is a Fire-Stuff (Feuerzeug). A vehicle is a Drive-Stuff (Fahrzeug). A toy is a Play-Stuff (Spielzeug). And the list goes on!
This is exceptionaly informationaly dense, a classic demonstration of culture, philosophy and language comming together in a susinct, plain , knowable way.
Go German!
The article left me with one question: If LLMs use human-written documentation or words, like books and articles, as training data right now (which is obviously the best quality you can get), what will LLMs use in the future? When will we reach the point of no return, where training data is data produced by LLMs (which is obviously of lesser quality)?
My favourite German word and the one I miss most in other languages is the ubiquitous
"doch".
I love that it can stand alone. To the best of my knowledge there is no word in English with the same function that can be used as a standalone answer.
When used in a sentence it usually stands in the middle and nicely sandwiches the criticism.
"Ich hab's Dir doch gesagt!"
You can put it in front if you want to get straight to the point:
"Doch, ich hab's Dir gesagt!"
It is never at the end like in the English equivalent:
"I told you so!"
The appended "so" feels much like kicking someone when they're already down.
Obvious real world usage example for standalone "Doch!":
I only knew a few words—Wille and Vorstellung—from The World as Will and Representation by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
Wille cannot connect directly to another; it can only be connected through Vorstellung. Some may excel at connecting the Wille behind the Vorstellung, while others do not.
But LLMs excel at this; they can grasp the Wille behind almost any text, which is essentially a form of Vorstellung.
41 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] threadI love this analogy and am going to use it.
This is a fantastic article. In the end, everything is still, and will always be, about people. We ignore and forget that at our peril.
Thanks!
> It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition.
Then the second half
> A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time.
Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked well for us who grew up pre-Internet is not working well for "web natives".
You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.
My favourite though: Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher. It's one of those things that you never knew you needed.
In the end I'm hopeful about this because it means there will be more concise and navigable documentation for me to refer to (though I might be slightly offended to be reading the AGENTS.md instead of the README.md, lol)
Adding an AGENTS.md was as easy as running our single-page static HTML output through Pandoc with a separate context header section stapled to the frontmatter.
My fiancée recently remarked that she'd been doing more writing on paper because it made her more productive. She theorized that she takes an editor's mindset in the face of WYSIWYG renditions of her spelling mistakes. The same goes for her design work. The industry tools make it too easy to recognize "wrong" as it's happening. That sounds like a singing endorsement of these tools, but our experience working with lower-tech tools has informed a different conclusion. You're not being "helped" to see "wrong" in what you do, you're being cut off. Your generative, creative mode is being inhibited.
https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app
In german we have some of those -stand words.
While thinking about this I had a curious thought that maybe the word "against" derives not just from "agegn" but from a two word phrase "agegn standan". Google is not helpful. Claude AI suggests that the "st" ending actually developed later, likely through analogy with other prepositions ending in "-st" like "amongst" and "whilst."
Just makes me happy.
> Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something.
...while many words in Germany are just "stuff" (Zeug). A plane is a Fly-Stuff (Flugzeug). A lighter is a Fire-Stuff (Feuerzeug). A vehicle is a Drive-Stuff (Fahrzeug). A toy is a Play-Stuff (Spielzeug). And the list goes on!
A “stand against” would be a Widerstand, which also exists.
Update: Interestingly the etymology is really “ stand against”, you always leans something here.
It took me a while to learn how to pronounce it. It's not really harder than "industrial estate" but it looked very exotic to me back then.
I should also note that "Ausfahrt" is the largest town/city in Germany - its everywhere according to the autobahn signs!
literally "over asked"
ich bin überfragt => no clue on how to answer this
"doch".
I love that it can stand alone. To the best of my knowledge there is no word in English with the same function that can be used as a standalone answer.
When used in a sentence it usually stands in the middle and nicely sandwiches the criticism.
"Ich hab's Dir doch gesagt!"
You can put it in front if you want to get straight to the point:
"Doch, ich hab's Dir gesagt!"
It is never at the end like in the English equivalent:
"I told you so!"
The appended "so" feels much like kicking someone when they're already down.
Obvious real world usage example for standalone "Doch!":
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WJlZLG9UXSY&pp=ygUMbmVpbiBkb2NoI...
Wille cannot connect directly to another; it can only be connected through Vorstellung. Some may excel at connecting the Wille behind the Vorstellung, while others do not.
But LLMs excel at this; they can grasp the Wille behind almost any text, which is essentially a form of Vorstellung.