I just closed the tutorial section of a smaller IaaS company from an unnamed country. The company in question presents detailed documentation as one of the main selling points – “Every topic is covered, you won’t get lost”. They are shy of 40 employees, one technical writer, some marketing people. And I counted over 2800 tutorials on their website! The mystery is not hard to solve – these are all totally random AI articles. And everyone with half a brain can see it: We all can tell that detached, helpful tone-of-voice paired with frequent subheadings.

Truly hellish monkey job, and a useless one

I’m trying to imagine what the work of their technical writer looks like. The writer sits in front of the ChatGPT the whole day, every day. He asks ChatGPT to pick random topics related to say VPS or WordPress. Then just copy-paste the article into one of their categories. Since they have about 10 categories and no tags, it is not a difficult decision. A truly hellish monkey job.

I have so many questions. For instance:

Do the executives know how obvious that is? And do they care? I wonder if they did open the section at least once. 

Is this a deliberate attempt to lower support costs? Because since you have 2800 tutorials, your support can just randomly bomb customers with endless links instead of real help.

Did the marketing people convince someone they need it for SEO? Because more pages, more visitors, right? Right?!

Do they come up with some kind of AI automation and just pretend they have a real technical writer?

Why AI alone can’t cover the docs

Such documentation is of course useless. The only way to utilize a similar pile of pages is to type the topic you want to know more about into the search bar on top of the docs page. But even then, you would have to have some serious admin skills to know what to look for. And if you have some serious skills, you don’t need their docs.

For instance, I asked ChatGPT to spill out some useful tutorials for Linux VPS. I got some interesting answers including the ifconfig command. Fair enough, everyone should know this one. And when I checked our IaaS company in question, they indeed have a pretty detailed site about this command. Naturally copy-pasted from ChatGPT.

All options are parameters for this command are described correctly, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that the visitors have no idea when and why they need this command. For instance, to find something so trivial like list of network interfaces and their IP addresses. 

And this brings me as to why AI is still light years away from fully grasping tutorials and technical documentation – it fails to pinpoint what’s important, and it fails to put things into context. 

Save the energy for better docs

Instead of bombing your users with useless pages, try to think from their perspective. It would be good to create a guide on networking for your customers. Put there the most useful commands like ifconfig and send it to your new customers. Let the users grow with you and show them you understand their needs. That’s how you keep your customers to stick around. More skilled customers are also the ones more open to upsell. If I had to recommend something to the IaaS company in question, I would do:

• Proper onboarding guides: Because at this point, you have the best chance to estimate what problems your users will run into

• Focus on intent, not tools: As with the previous example with ifconfig, tools alone are useless if you don’t know when to use them.

• Implement videos: Add videos to existing articles where customers struggle the most. Watching AND reading seriously increases chances of these AHA moments.