The Miller Principle (2007) (opens in new tab)

For fun, I recently rebuilt a little text adventure some friends and I had built in the early 2000s. Originally written in QBasic, I translated it line by line in Go, and set it up as a little SSH server.

For posterity, I didn't want to change anything about the actual game itself but knew beforehand that the commands were difficult to figure out organically. To try and help modern players, I added an introductory heading when you start playing informing the player that this was a text adventure game and that "help" would give them a basic list of commands.

Watching people attempt to play it in the logs, it became painfully obvious no one read the heading, at all. Almost no one ever typed "help". They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.

I wish this was the case. Then we wouldn't have a minority of us deeply frustrated :)

'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.

A customer contacts me and says 'I have an error'. After several emails I manage to get them to send me a screenshot of the error. The error message describes the exact problem and what to do about in one short sentence. I type pretty much exactly the error message text into my reply. This solves their problem. I think they see 'error' or 'warning' and they don't even read the rest of the sentence. Extraordinary. But it has happened more than once.

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).

Same goes for documentation, PRs, PRs comments…

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'.

Joel Spolsky in 2000 [0]: „Users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to.”

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

I have found much value in reading the python and sqlite documentation. The Arch wiki is another reliable source.

Good documentation is hard.

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...

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.

Probably true. Also probably true: people have read enough of the things he listed and concluded that they wasted their time. I remember trying Linux in the RTFM days, and let me tell you, those were some terrible documents even when they did talk about the problem.

Damn, this is thin content even for HN.

Anyway, this is just projection. The Miller principle really should be "Miller doesn't read anything". I read plenty.

It's one of the main things I learned when working as tech support and I talked with users all day. Nobody reads anything.

The LLMs read everything.

Yeah, i'm also surprised people just read post title and jump to conclusions ...

I read this entire post and all the comments this disproving the Miller principle

This is not true, I proof-read the documentation I write!

I didn't read the article, but ...

The agents will read them

We are reaching society shown in "Johny Mnemonic" movie.. So much (useless) information around that people gets overloaded. I barely read anything these days on NH, too much (crap) information. I skim and only read stuff that is very close to my interest.

I used to read a lot more in the past, not the case anymore..

Write-only memory

Should probably be "The Miller Principle (2007)"

Except now LLMs read everything.

..and emails

tl;dr

tl;dr: ' '

Unironically I was pasting the URL of this article into chat GPT to summarise