📝 Being a docs nerd is a strength in the age of LLMs

As someone who struggles to remember anything, I don’t have the luxury of trusting my brain to keep track of it. I’ve been a “docs guy” on every team I’ve ever been on, mainly because I am a sucky colleague asking dumb questions 100 times if I don’t. In the age of LLMs, if you document your application and the history of decisions that have grown it well, you’ll get significantly more useful outputs when working with agents. Context engineering and all that jazz. For people who already have good habits around documentation, they get this bonus for free! Other people will need to learn & strengthen this muscle.

Applying to teams

In my experience, it’s always been a challenge to build a culture of documentation at work. People will agree that it sounds useful, but their lack of action speaks louder than their words (ironically the action would also be words, in this case). Even on other teams I worked with, I could see there was often just one hero doing the vast majority of writing up useful docs & keeping old ones up to date.

Fear not! For those docs nerds among us, we now have another arrow in the quiver of reasons to encourage people to contribute. Anecdotally & from skimming online, it seems people are more motivated to document if it helps a robot find answers, than if it would have helped your new-hire Craig. I guess f*ck Craig, but you’ll write up a million words to feed Claude? In this case, we gotta take what we can get.