r/sysadmin • u/New-Seesaw1719 Sysadmin • 2h ago
Microsoft Microsoft documentation written by AI
God help us....
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u/marry_me_jane 57m ago
Are we….
Are we surprised?
My biggest shock is that it took this long for it to appear/ get noticed.
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u/Gesha24 1h ago
If there's any consolation, AI tends to do a decent job reading and summarizing documents written by the other AI. So just copy-paste it into the chat, ask it to give you steps to implement - and mission accomplished
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u/Cormacolinde Consultant 1h ago
So we’re spending power for the LLM to generate the doc, then spending more power on another LLM to summarize/re-interpret the doc. Both of which could hallucinate. And that power generation is releasing more greenhouse gases in the air, the datacenters are creating a blight in communities and people are losing their jobs.
For what again? So the oligarchs can buy more islands and yachts?
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u/Gesha24 1h ago
I have a personal LLM for my own projects (so the cost is already paid for in hardware) and rather generous token limit at work - and my workflow has switched to letting LLM read all the instructions. I can't tell you how many times the manual doesn't specify some switch that's present in the code, or the switch is specified and then the code actually doesn't call it, or the parts of documentation conflict with each other... Hallucinations are mostly fixed with "provide direct quote from manual". It's not perfect, but it's better for reading your average documentation. And if the documentation is great - well, then LLM is also very unlikely to get confused about it.
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u/_Do_The_Needful_ 1h ago
Putting aside the whole money and hating the rich thing for a second, AI is a useful tool. Small businesses that could barely scrape by can use it to gain efficiency in areas and stay afloat, provide faster service, increase production speed, potentially lower prices of their goods and services.
It is already showing useful breakthroughs in medicine and science.
Cows also produce quite a bit of greenhouse gas. Humans eat cows. By your logic, less humans would also be beneficial because less cows would be required.
If your job was easy enough that you could teach someone else how to do it within an hour or two, automation was coming for your job in the next few years either way. The world is constantly advancing, this is just another breakthrough.
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u/jackmusick 53m ago
It's also a little disingenuous to act confused that AI's will write the documentation and another agent will need it to read it too. For the good documentation at least, there's still a lot of work to make it correct and tested, and other agents wouldn't have it that in their models necessarily so it'll need to fetch something as the source of truth.
Just the other day I had it setup a Teams bot, which I've done before, and is one of my least favorite things in existence. It prodded a lot of Microsoft documentation to consult least-privilege permissions to do what I needed, had me approve the setup in the Graph module and Azure CLI and built the Bot manifest for me to upload. It was the past of least resistance by far to do something more securely than I would've taken time to do on my own, and relied on the Microsoft Docs to do so, which were likely generated from whatever CI process they have generating permission docs. A model on it's own would not produce a good result here.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 1h ago
Okay and? This ain't exactly new and people 90% of the people in this career field use LLM/AI anyways.
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u/chillzatl 1h ago
oh but you can't have your asshat badge if you don't act like everything that comes within a mile of AI is default terrible.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 1h ago
Shit sorry forgot this is Reddit.
Microsoft using AI Slop?? God I can't wait for them to go out of business from it and everyone who supports or uses LLMs is literally going to burn forever in hell
/s
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u/inadvertant_bulge 1h ago
Sorry, forgot you are not from reddit, you're from the land where everyone agrees about everything and you can never be wrong. Say hi to Santa and the Easter bunny for me!
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u/VaporousMote 1h ago
And those of who don't have our heads up our asses and have been doing this for decades think it's uniquely, terribly bad?
God forbid someone dislike an aspect of their work they are forced into
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u/yamsyamsya 1h ago
As long as a human audits it afterwards, who cares? I used AI all the time to proof read documentation but it is always verified by a knowledgable human. Like I get paid to be good at computers, not because I'm good at using words.
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u/RainStormLou Sysadmin 32m ago
as far as I can tell, I'm the human auditing it afterward and Microsoft doesn't pay me or respond acceptably to feedback lol.
I've submitted two support tickets for incorrect Learn pages lately just to put them on their human radar, and recently had a meeting with our account rep where we discussed inaccuracies specifically related to them generating the Learn pages, and they acknowledged the issue and "escalated it up."
it's fine to hand wave and be like "well as long as x is happening" if X is actually happening, but x isn't happening. It's clearly not being reviewed.
How many times have they already gotten shit this year for using AI for quality assurance on a user experience? I fucking pay them. this isn't a free service from a mom and pop shop. Its Microsoft, and I expect and demand more or we'll stop paying for bullshit and migrate even further away.
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u/vitaroignolo 1h ago
Great. Our users have issues with receiving assistance unless we have them launch the app and sign in which adds 10 minutes troubleshooting time while we teach them what the start menu is. No mention of an app config policy to fix this.
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u/QuesoMeHungry 2h ago
Anytime emojis are used in official communications you know it’s straight up AI slop.