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v1ne | on: Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995
The trick about documentation is depth, not prose. You need context and understanding to write documentation "like in the old days". No amount of LLM trickery will free you from that. Once you have that source material, it's easy to re-shape it into an 80's/90's/00's doc format.

Negative example: I was looking into the German manual of my Canon EOS R5 II, and it is just fluff. Hundreds of pages, full of white space, telling me about features without actually explaining what they mean. Awful automatic translations. Their manuals used to be good (looking at my EOS 6D). But these days: oh boy.

_the_inflator | parent | next
My tooth brusher: Take the <Brand Name Product Name> and turn on <THE SUPERAWESOME MEGE POWER INNOVATIVE BEST IN THE WORLD> feature to experience <Brand Name Product Name> unique...

At that moment I felt sorry for this company, very sorry. How can you have so much disrespect for your customers? Does anyone in the physical world talk like this or do you marketing guys want to be talked to in such terms?

Brutal.

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theletterf | parent | next
Author here. Another trick, I would argue, is consistency, hence the focus on style.

I also wrote on what I think makes docs beautiful, by the way! https://passo.uno/what-makes-docs-beautiful/

bebna | parent
That is canon for ya, should have used INSERT_OTHER_MANUFACTURER_HERE$ /s

But if you look how much manuals get ignored by the customer, it doesn’t make sense to put work into them.

It is much better to let a YouTuber do it, by lending them the product and throw small amount of money against them.

Manuals are just there for legal or certifications requirements these days.

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