🏗️ Documentation as Infrastructure

With the advent of AI and especially LLM's it has become clear that less and less people go to the actual forums, websites, documentation pages than ever before. The reason is quite simple and it is called drum roll 🥁, surprise surprise Large Language Models and AI Agents 🤖.  These systems have been trained on the whole internet including all the tutorial websites or any website you always used in the past.

Before, this boom most people would go to the knowledge forums like Quora, Stack exchange, Reddit, Documentation pages and Blogs about basically anything. Yes, people also copied other websites and then made sure to end up on the top of search engine to earn money through ads ;). But for most of it, humans would visit websites for information, knowledge and studying. 

Today, that turned on its head and most people are almost never leaving their LLM/AI agent user interface unless they are actually studying a subject or want to build something that takes a bit more effort than just clicking through some settings of a well known device or app. 

 

 

 

So all these documentation instances are really for people that are interested in the subject. It won't be for people that just want their home server up and running and install apps. 

For the ecosystem, the implications are murkier. LLMs were trained on Stack Overflow's corpus. If the site continues declining, where will future training data come from? Who will catch and correct the errors that LLMs confidently present?

The question isn't whether AI will displace these platforms. The question is what comes next - how we'll generate, verify, and maintain the knowledge that future AI systems will need to stay accurate.