"Documentation is like sex: You're not getting any"
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Damn haha, this made me laugh out loud
Someone's never read instructions autotranslated from Chinese and not checked for accuracy.
Well, sometimes I ask questions to the AI and makes the same sense.
Literally me yesterday trying to decipher Baidu’s PaddleOCR docs. Have half a mind to aim Claude Code at the URL and just be like ‘plz help’
Absolutely not. I'd rather have no documentation and start from scratch than be gaslit by an entire team of people telling me that the very obviously wrong documentation is correct and has been correct for 30 years
I think there's a difference between bad and wrong. Wrong documentation is incorrect. Bad documentation isn't really incorrect, it's just poorly executedb and mostly unhelpful.
I mean, incorrect documentation is clearly bad, so...
Seemed more like the problem was the gaslighting than the documentation.
Wrong documentation is still a pretty big problem, even without the gaslighting. Incomplete documentation is better than none; incorrect documentation is not.
I can name a few examples of this
That documentation sounds like marriage.
You ok?
Well also like sex, when it's really bad it's worse than nothing.
Then you haven’t seen bad documentation (or had that sex you regret).
In general it’s supposed to be something good so it shouldn’t be harmful, but ofc exceptions exist, especially with sex, sadly…
Bad often equals "not super good" in this context
I've had to use outdated documentation that made the problem worse. So I guess bad documentation is like bad, unprotected sex with a lot lizard that leaves you with an itching or burning sensation.
no.
Bad documentation could land you in prison.
Bad sex is just horrible all around.
not sure what this post is on about
I would say bad sex can land you in a prison too.
good point
Respectfully disagree. Sometimes the documentation is so bad that you have more questions than answers and even then, what they provide still doesn't really explain how to do something with enough details. It's all literally shot in the dark and you're just left with leap of faith. * cough * Sonicwall * cough *
Incidentally, both bad sex and code documentation both involve std vectors.
When it's bad you think "Fuck this, I can do it better by myself."
Bad sex is not better than no sex.... Wtf... :)
the person who wrote this hasn't had bad sex yet
I guess its also our culture where sex is seen as the most important thing in life. So everyone is convinced their entire value consists of how much mating they are doing. Maybe that would be true if we were breeding animals but we are not.
weird, i do not know of this culture and I'm glad cuz I'd be worthless
It's different from person to person. The most consistent thing I've found is people trying to fit each other into a cultural box
As an asexual person this anology is very confusing
Maybe it can be translated into something else, like, "Documentation is like toilet paper, when it's good it's good, when it's bad it's better than nothing"? Or, "Documentation is like clothes, even if they are bad it's better than nothing", or "Documentation is like having something you need, it's better to have the thing you need even if is not good, than to not have the thing you need at all"?
I like the analogy with toilet paper. Because when its bad, the very thing that was supposed to help you, got you covered in shit with no back out plan, making it that much worse.
Very fitting
As a sexual person, I agree
Documentation: use x function Reality: x function depreciated
Don't be virgins, document things
Deal, I've got plenty of small hobby projects that can use some!
When documentation is missing critical bits of information I don't know if its better than nothing. Spend ages and then have to raise a ticket saying its a bug because its not working as documented, when no documentation would have just been an instant ticket raised asking how its supposed to work. Because it turns out everything was working correctly and the customer had just set something up wrong but there was no documentation covering that bit so according to what we had, all looked good.
There's this cool program called qalc. I stumble on to cool features in it that's not even listed in the documentation.
What about rape? Is that just chatgpt reworded documentation?
When something like python tries to force readability into your code without your consent?
That's why I always use a nonsensical class structure with stupid names; it's my chastity belt.
Oh dang, how long until some company just feeds their entire codebase into an llm and calls it documentation?
I guarantee it's already happened. The question is when a company large enough that you can't avoid it follows suit.
What if the documentation is wrong?
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