My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
LLMs are trained on work that humans created. But now we’re telling humans to change how they write because “you sound like an LLM.” When you see “It’s not x, it’s y”. Or em-dashes, or other common constructs in AI writing, those are there because millions of documents by millions of people contain those things. I’ve worked with a lot of people who produced articles or books without having any writing background.
Documentation drives growth, if you enable it.
Some things I learned while using Claude Code to build projects and tools.
I keep seeing the narrative that “marketing is about storytelling.” It’s important to remember that the story isn’t about you, your product, or your features. Your customers are the heroes of those stories. Their victories are your victory. And you want the prospects to be the hero that saves the day with your product. They’re the heroes of your next story. What superpowers will you give them? What will they be able to do that they couldn’t before?
My biggest frustration with modern docs is that much of the industry standardized on Markdown. And Markdown isn’t semantic. A keyword, a term, a “first use” item all don’t exist. You mix presentation with meaning rather than separating. XML for docs wasn’t fun but it was structured. You could denote terms. You could have actual admonitions. And so the solution seems to be hacks that turn Markdown k to structured docs, embedded HTML spans with classes, and….
Networking and referrals land you jobs because AI is screening you out of the application pile.
I started writing a new book. It’ll be short. But it’ll be hands-on. I’m writing it because this is the third time I’m implementing the topic, and I’m tired of writing the same explanations. I want a book to point at. I’m no stranger to this. There are docs for lots of things, but reference docs only tell a part of the story. People need a golden path. And I’m good at providing that.
December 18th, 2024 was my last day at Temporal Technologies.
I keep seeing how “LLMs are great teaching tools! I asked it to explain X to me and it did!” Don’t be fooled! Ask it to explain a technical topic you deeply understand and you’ll start to see where it makes things up. It is a predictive text engine. Sure, you can do all sorts of prompt hacking to get better results. But at the end of the day, if you don’t know the topic really well you will never know if it made up the facts it gave you.
Software development doesn’t have to be your career. Use it to solve pain points in your life, like the one I had today.
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