In the late 1990s, right back at the start of my squiggly career, I was a 'Technical Author' - writing tests for mobile phone software. (Not writing software tests - literally, instructions for the people like me who would have to run the tests. (eg. "Press Menu > 1 > 1 : You should be in a 'Compose New SMS' screen".)

I liked the idea of writing - in particular, the idea of writing something that would help people make the most of consumer technology (phones - this was pre-smartphone, PCs, software etc.) User manuals at the time were typically a joke - written in technical jargon that you could only understand if you already understood how the things worked. ¹ So my plan at the time was to get into that side of "technical authoring"; making complicated things simple.

After a few meetings and chats with various people in the field, the first realisation I had was that the reason was that the people writing the "user" documentation were spending >90% of their time writing the technical documentation for engineers; their job was literally the opposite of communicating complex things in simple ways for non-technical people.

The other thing I realised was that the future of this kind of 'documentation' wasn't going to be printed on a piece of paper in the box that the technology came in; it was going to be on the website, where it could be constantly updated, revised etc.

Well - that wasn't entirely incorrect. In the last few weeks, I've needed to find manuals for a few things; we've moved into a new house, and I've needed to understand things like an extractor fan that had stopped spinning, a water pump that controls the heating, and some flat-pack furniture from the old house I needed to reassemble. For all three, I found what I was looking for online - and for all three, it was in the form of a PDF of the printed piece of paper that presumably originally came in the box.

But still - I think its true as a more general trend. Or at least, it has been.

"Documentation" might not have quite made the leap from the static paper-based things to a truly dynamic, searchable, interactive version - but the vast majority of the time, the web will still get you the answers to your questions. Maybe thats a Reddit thread. Maybe its an obscure electricians' forum where someone has asked for help for exactly the same extractor fan problem that I've had - and someone else has provided it.

But the thing that occurred to me this morning, as I was playing with a local LLM and asking it for help about some technical details around how to configure it, was that there is an opportunity for these models to be "self-documenting" that seems to be being missed. Meta's Llama model seemed to struggle with some questions about configuring itself (sending me off on a weird path of writing python scripts, editing .zshrc configuration files - before I did a google search and realised I could do what I wanted to do with two lines of code in the same window that I was 'talking' to the Llama model in.

A fairly small LLM, trained on the model's own documentation should surely be able to get you to an accurate answer much faster and easier than the current 'best option' of Google/Reddit/Stack Overflow searches - which can just as easily get you to outdated/obsolete advice as to the "right" answer.

Sure - LLMs hallucinate; but only when they are trying to provide an "answer" that they don't have enough information to provide and are forced into a 'best available information' situation - which a well-trained model with a single use case should not have a problem with.

Honestly - I think this is still true, for the most part. For example, the manual for a robot hoover we recently got tells you to push a button that is *not labelled on the actual robot* - only in the manual itself, in text so small I had to get my daughter to read it for me. (OK - my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but this was literally text on a diagram about 1mm high.) I'm sure it made perfect sense in the version on the designer's 5K screen - but the actual version that the user had to rely on was almost useless. ↩

Some Random Nerd