This signals something that is happening somehow predictably due to the increasing abundance of code. It exponentially grows the surface offered for understanding (text as in comments, docs etc) and our attention bandwidth, well, is not exponentially growing, so...
I think this is more true now than ever. Before LLMs, when someone came up with an ADR/RFC/etc you had to read it because you had to approve it or reject it. People were putting effort and, yeah, you could use them in your next perf. review to gain extra points. You could easily distinguish well written docs from the crap (that also made the job of reviewing them easie)
Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/ADR and even though you can tell if they are LLM generated, you cannot easily reject them based on that factor only. So here we are spending hours reading something the author spent 5 min. to generate (and barely knows what’s about).
Watching the Artemis II splashdown and following media event, I’m suspicious that a woman from TechTalk Media read out some LLM blurb instead of asking a question; I can’t prove it, but I can almost hear the em-dash in:
"What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing. That curiosity is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft -- you tested mankind's potential...”
As a counterexample, thanks to LLMs many long-form articles that get posted with clickbaity (but devoid of content) headlines that I would have ignored otherwise now get "read" (albeit indirectly, with the prompt "Summarize the insights of the article $ARTICLE_URL in an academic, dry, technical and information-dense way")
Despite using an ai while programming I still have open Java doc and other api documents and find them very useful as the ai often gives code based on old apis instead of what I'm actually using. So I do read those documents.
But also, I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that sends rambling extra-long emails, often all one paragraph. If I can't figure out what he's asking by reading the first couple and last couple of sentences I ask him to summarize it with bullet pouts and it actually works. Lol.
This principle applies to the following:
- User documentation
- Specifications
- Code comments
- Any text on a user interface
- Any email longer than one line
The Laravel documentation is GREAT when you're getting started. Every chapter starts by answering the very question you might ask yourself if you're going through it top to bottom.
I'm a one-man-band so if I write code comments, I write them for future me because up to this point he has been very grateful. Creating API documentation is also easy if you can generate it based on the comments in your code.
Maybe rename it the Filler principle. Nobody reads mindless comments that are 'filler'.
Everything has to be fast like a youtube short now.
People find wrestling with LLM to do something simple is better than reading a book that will teach them 10x the information in a linear way.
Anything deep takes too much time and is too expensive.
It is stupid to make a deeply tough-ought product that works well. You should create 50 useless garbage and see what grabs peoples attention.
Everyone should create 50 garbage things instead of everyone doing something actually useful.
Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/ADR and even though you can tell if they are LLM generated, you cannot easily reject them based on that factor only. So here we are spending hours reading something the author spent 5 min. to generate (and barely knows what’s about).
Same goes for documentation, PRs, PRs comments…
"What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing. That curiosity is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft -- you tested mankind's potential...”
'Thanks for the doc, let's set a meeting' (implied: so you can read the doc aloud to us ) is the bane of my existence.
But also, I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that sends rambling extra-long emails, often all one paragraph. If I can't figure out what he's asking by reading the first couple and last couple of sentences I ask him to summarize it with bullet pouts and it actually works. Lol.
So if the read of the Miller principle is interpreted as read+understanding (it should) an interesting deeper discussion can happen.
It can be invoked with a way more dramatic "None understands anything"
Anyway, this is just projection. The Miller principle really should be "Miller doesn't read anything". I read plenty.
Good documentation is hard.
I'm a one-man-band so if I write code comments, I write them for future me because up to this point he has been very grateful. Creating API documentation is also easy if you can generate it based on the comments in your code.
Maybe rename it the Filler principle. Nobody reads mindless comments that are 'filler'.
it's in there