You know, limited to a certainamount of data, and we're always
gonna have new information.
We're always gonna have new data, we'realways gonna have new ways to do things,
new features, all that sort of stuff.
And it's really important for that stuffto also show up to any of your users,
anybody building on your platform.
So yes, the economic structures of theweb are shifting, and I don't think
we're all excited about that, but thereis still gonna be value in putting
fresh, relevant content forward on ai.
So let's talk about some objectives.
What are we doing now and whatare people going to be doing next?
Um, we know that.
AI is important.
We know that there's gonna haveto be some documentation because
LLMs aren't gonna know everything.
So let's talk about where the valuealigns while I take a drink of water.
Think about it for yourself.
Okay, so right now we have.
SEO, everyone knows what SEO is, right?
Search engine optimization.
Um, but next we're starting to seethings like A EOG, E-O-L-L-M-E-O
and so on, all these other terms.
And it is very confusing becausethey all sound different.
They all kind of feel different.
They all kind of still the same thing.
At the end of the day, anything thatyou make needs to be discoverable.
And at the end of theday, search really is.
The sense of where, uh, discovery is.
And LLMs, this is an exampleof me searching for something.
They're still using search algorithmsto find more recent relevant content and
then blending that into a, um, LLMs note.
So here I'm saying, Hey, how do I setup my local WooCommerce environment?
And I wanted to seelike, what would it say?
And it gives me like areally good tutorial.
But on the sidebar you can see allof the websites that it searched.
Um, there were some other ones, butI scrolled it to make sure it showed
our WooCommerce developer blog.
And so like that.
Sense of the combination of LM withwhat's out on the open web is still
really important and is actually goingto continue to be important for a while?
I think so.
I don't want to make you feel likethere's no value to having documentation.
This is really kind of a big partof it is the, the blending of how it
uses the existing search algorithmsand the SEO as it stands now to bring
in most relevant content and so.
Don't feel bad about it.
Did anybody here go toWordCamp US by any chance?
Whether you did or didn't go online, andI really recommend watching this talk.
This is Danny Sullivan.
He's at Google and he gives a wholetalk about SEO and how it's changing
and how it's not changing and how youshould do things differently, but you
shall also do things the same and stuff.
Um.
Go find the link to it.
It's, it's really good.
He kind of does it in a reallyuser-friendly way and he just kind
of talks about this concept thatSEO is still like deeply informing a
lot of AI responses and the way thatpeople are getting their information.
Right now, another objective of a lotof times having good documentation
is to reduce support, right?
If I have really good documentation,nobody's ever gonna bug me for support
requests because they're just gonnaread my guides and my tutorials,
and they're gonna do it themselves.
And you know, it's justgonna make everything easier.
And after all, I thinkwhat we all thought.
Who wants to talk to a chat bot all day?
Nobody wants to talk to a chat bot.
They want to talk to a human.
They want to get their information fast.
The reality is that people actuallydo want to talk to a chat bot all day.
In fact, they're spending plentyof time inside of AI talking
to all of these chat bots.
So while we were originally thinkingof documentation as a way to reduce
support, we have to now thinkof it as a way to train support.
Having really good documentationactually makes support better.
And so if you have a plugin andyou are kind of creating a. Like
any sort of like chat interface foryour, for your like help support.
The better documented your product is, thebetter informed you can make your agent.
And more than that, a lot ofpeople aren't going directly to
your website, to your chat bot.
This is how I use, uh, AI very constantly.
This is like a raycast, kind of likecommand palette on your Mac and you
just pop it up and you can just ask itany question and it runs it through ai.
So in this case, I'm asking it forsome advice for Adobe Premier Pro,
but a lot of people are not gonnago straight to you and your source.
They're gonna go to the nearest chatbot that they're using, whether it's
copilot or CLO or whatever in theirterminal, or chat, GPT or whatever.
So there's still a lot of value to makesure that all this information is still
out there and available to everybody.
So good written support.
Is so important right now.
We do a lot of support and documentationwith the goal of educating our users,
educating developers, um, making sure theyknow how to use the product, making sure
they know how to build on your product,making sure they know how to extend it.
Um, but more often than not, we dohave to think about the fact that
a lot of what we're gonna be doing.
Is educating AI so that when adeveloper comes to use your product
and they go through the mediation ofai, that they end up, uh, still getting
relevant and good information becausethe ultimate goal is that they just
have a successful, happy experienceand that they use your product well.
So let's jump into some practicalapplications of some best practices,
um, to kind of prepare for this.
I talked to.
A lot of people internally, I talkto a lot of people that I know
who work at different agencies.
I talk to people who own products.
I kind of just wanted to askeverybody like, what are you doing?
How are you dealing with this?
What are you seeing that works?
Um, I've talked to a lot ofdevelopers to kind of see like, how
are you actually working these days?
Because the fun thing about being adeveloper advocate is that you spend most
of your time being an advocate and almostnone of your time being a developer.
Um, so this is not a definitivelist, but I got five pieces of
advice, but I'm gonna start.
With this tweet.
So this is one of my favorite thingsI keep seeing on Twitter, which is
the person who posts a thing wherethey give you all the great advice.
You don't have to read it.
I'll just explain.
I'm gonna give you all the greatadvice on how to vibe code.
Has anybody ever seen tweets?
People giving advice on how to vibe code?
My favorite thing about thesetweets, these, here's the best
way to vibe code, is when you readit, it's just a list of things you
shouldn't be doing as a developer.
It's like use version control,write technical specs.
Like it's always just like.
Generic common developer advice,but let's just pretend that it's
advice for ai, for vibe coding.
Um, it's kind of obnoxious, but it worksbecause it gets a ton of engagement to
repackage the same traditional adviceand pretend like it's some newfound
insight or some new way to workflow.
Um, that's exactly whatI'm gonna do right now.
I'm gonna give you guyssome generic for one.
We're gonna, I'm gonna recommend that youget back to documenting inside your code.
If you're writing code, uh,you should be documenting it.
WordPress is an open source platform.
So most of the developers that I talk towhen they're working on building WordPress
plugin, they're building a website.
They're building an e-commerce store.
If they're at the point wherethey're writing code, most of
them are gonna open up WordPress.
Whether you're using somethinglike a cloud code or you're
using something like VS.
Code with copilot, they're actually gonnaopen up the entire WordPress directory.
So you can see like WP contentwith all the plugins in it.
And you can see WP admin, like they wannahave all of that code in in the context.
And the nice thing about WordPressis now all that code is open source.
The developer actually gets to readall of the code and has access to
it, which means the AI that they'reusing has access to all of the code.
So at WooCommerce, for example, thebetter documented our code is going to
be inside of the code, the better it'sgonna be for that developer who's building
the extension or doing some filters fortheir client or something like that.
Because all of that getsfed into the context.
I think there was this theorythat AI would get so good at
coding that it wouldn't need.
Documenting documentation insidethe code that it would just read the
code and it would know why you didthat stupid function and it would
know why you did that weird thing.
The truth is that's not the case atall and the better that you can explain
things, the better you can say like whysomething was used a certain way, how
it's used, what are the side effectsof using it, all that sort of stuff.
Uh, that kind of good comment.
Hygiene is actually gonnahelp anybody building on your
platform, especially in WordPress.
So I created an example file,I'll send like the slides.
It's not really that important.
It's what's more important is like theover visual thing, which is the fact
that there's a ton of comments here.
This is a fake function.
I called it capital C. Dang it.
And it makes WooCommerce have acapital C anytime you type WooCommerce.
Um, I, I don't know that this is real.
I really hope we don't have it.
Uh, I should have checked ifthis is a real thing that exists.
Um, the point here is thatthere's a few key places.
Number one, every file should reallyget comments at the top of it.
Like that you really needto explain what's in a file,
um, because it's gonna help.
Uh.
Determine if that file is usefulfor any specific task functions.
Like don't skip on yourfunction documentation here.
This is critically important.
The other thing is inline comments.
Um, this example has like thingslike what the variable is.
That's probably a little too much.
I think it can infer what the variableis, but it is really important.
And when you're starting to doweird things or make specific
decisions to document it, um.
I think there was like a brief momentwhere it felt like documentation
inside of code was not gonna beimportant, but uh, actually it is.
And one of the things I've heard, uh,from a couple of overs, which I didn't
know, but people were recommendingactually adding links to proper
documentation inside of your code blocks.
Um, because a lot of AI now are, whenthey see a link that ex, that is like
more information on a specific file orfunction, uh, it's actually pulling those
links and bringing that into the context.
Um, so this is, again, it's one ofthose things that this is just good
practice for any developers to do.
Um, whether you're using AI ornot, you should have links and
comments and that sort of stuff.
Um, but that, uh, is actuallystill being pretty useful with ai.
The other thing is, this isa screenshot of like our.
Our documentation page where we givelike a tutorial, and there's function
descriptions in the content here.
So again, like when you're doing tutorialsand you're, you know, explaining how to
like change a filter or something likethat and you provide example code, again,
document it, um, explain what all thevariables do, all that sort of stuff.
It's actually pretty important, um, toexplain, explain, explain, say how to
use it, how not to use it, uh, what arethe side effects, those sorts of things.
Uh, it's super handy.
So summary for document inside your code.
File level comments, function levelcomments, inline comments when
necessary, external links to resources.
And also number five,explain the intentions.
Explain the side effects of whatthings happen, when certain things
are used, um, especially thingsyou cannot infer from the code.
Number two, traditional wisdom,focus on semantic accessible H TM L
when you're writing support, guides,documents, all that sort of stuff.
Semantic, accessible.
HTML is still extremely important.
So, um, AI is.
A computer, but it really existsin the human world and it tries to
do things like a human, it triesto read things and understand them.
It's very language based.
Um, and so a lot of times what it's doingis scraping web pages and reading them.
So it actually still is extremelyimportant to continue using
semantic H two ML to continue makingsure your content is accessible.
Because even though AI is sort oflike an iPad kid raised on Reddit.
Um, it doesn't have eyes, itdoesn't have motor skills.
It doesn't have vision, so it's goingto be reading any of your documents,
any of your websites and stuff.
The same way that somebody who doesn'thave, uh, who has low vision or uh,
motor skill, uh, low motor skillswould be through accessible technology.
So it's very similar to that.
So it really doesn't make sense to keepprioritizing semantic accessible HTML.
Uh, when you do it, there areother things that people want to
add on top of their documentation.
Um.
When I first joined, I did someof these things like, has anybody
ever heard of the LLMs text file?
It's like a text filewith all the markdown.
Um, Ian was just telling me thatShopify had, has marked down right
versions of all their docs and stuff,and we started doing a lot of that.
Um, we made, did like a click tocopy this documentation to markdown.
Um, we did that.
I'm gonna be honest.
Uh, this is John Mueller from Google.
He says, no, AI systemcurrently uses LMS text.
I'm just sharing this because.
A lot of the things that you'llhear that are trendy, new ideas
are, there's nothing against it likewe did it, we have it, it's there.
Um, I'm sure somebody's usingit, but like, just be careful
with some of the advice to donew things, to try new things.
In many ways, traditional,good, accessible HTML is
still gonna be the way to go.
Uh.
It's, it sounds really nice to havelike markdown versions of everything,
and then the AI's gonna get thatmarkdown version and it's gonna save
you to a bunch of tokens and stuff.
I'm not really sure they care abouthow many of tokens that you use.
I'm pretty sure they want you to use more.
So, um, those things arecool and they're relevant.
If you are using them, then use 'emfor sure, but, uh, don't expect that
a lot of these kind of like new tools.
Uh, just focus on semantic accessibleH TM L for your support, for your
documentation so that it can be crawledand scraped easily and pulled into the
context to help answer people's questions.
So if you're not sure aboutsemantic accessible HML,
it's like just basic things.
Use HTML elements properly.
Use headings and hierarchy in yourtutorials, in your documentation.
Um, use alternative text anytimeyou show images of things.
Um, and make sure youhave a fast load time.
That one is actually really important.
Make sure that your youload time is really quick.
Number three, show.
Don't tell.
I'm sure many of people have heardthis as practical advice when you're,
um, writing your documentation.
Uh, like I love reading like a big,long philosophical rant about why we
made this API this way and where itcame from and all this sort of stuff.
That's not really helpfulin this situation.
Put that stuff on your developer blog.
Don't put it in your documentation.
Um, focus on specific.
Tasks and keeping everything concrete,showing exactly how to do things with,
uh, good guidance and good steps.
And one thing you need to do is avoid theuse of pseudo code or code that is not
real if you don't follow her on Twitter.
She's really funny.
She does really bad functions.
And then a bunch of bros get mad andyell at her not getting the joke at all.
It's really hilarious.
But, um.
Don't put fake code, don't put fakefunctions, don't skip things like that.
Um, because, uh, much like theTwitter bros, AI does not have a
sense of humor and does not fullyunderstand these sorts of things.
So you gotta be careful withthat, with pseudo code or bad
examples when you're doing it.
Show don't tell, show the real thing.
Show how it works.
Um, show it.
Exactly.
Show.
Make sure you're putting realfunctional code examples, real
use cases based on real things.
Sometimes it's fun to come up with cuteideas for documentation and stuff, but
again, it's the more you can focus on realthings and stuff that's task oriented and
not just like philosophical explanations,the more useful it's going to be.
Number four, embrace,uh, multiple mediums.
So.
Text is definitely important.
It's a big part of how AIis getting information.
Are we gonna enter an age where it'sable to like, watch entire tutorial
videos and spit them back to you?
Uh, maybe probably, but not right now.
But there are other ways that you canpresent your information that make you
stand out because, um, YouTube searchis an extremely important algorithm
that's still pretty successful.
So if you're not showing upin places like YouTube, um.
I would recommend it.
Somebody told me that they get all oftheir information off of developer TikTok.
That's a thing that exists.
Um, so there's other things that youngerdevelopers are really more interested in,
short form content, that sort of stuff.
So if you have the chance to movebeyond written documentation and
you're really trying to buildthat audience, um, or build that
connection, embrace multiple mediums.
This is.
From that Stack Overflow developersurvey at the beginning, and it's just
about how younger developers, theywant to see things that are different.
They like interactive stuff,like coding challenges.
They like things like videosand short form content.
So if you're interested in youngerdevelopers, uh, don't be surprised if
they don't wanna read your documentation.
So embrace multiple mediums.
YouTube is a search engine too.
It's still important.
Um, interactive coding, FAQs,lists, short form video, all that
sort of stuff is super useful.
Um, don't feel like.
Uh, just having to write documentationis the only way to do it.
And number five, it's still reallyimportant and I don't really feel like
I need to say this to a word camp.
I think we all kind ofunderstand this, but you do
still want to build a community.
'cause at the end of the day, whilethere's all the robots and AI and
all this sort of stuff, at the endof the day, like humans are making
decisions about your software.
Humans are choosing to use it,humans are implementing it.
Humans are still in the loop for now.
Um, so just make surethat you have a place.
To engage with your community andlearn from them and understand
their needs and habits.
Um, one example is you could throwa 1990s land party, perhaps, I
don't know, uh, if you wanted to.
Um, I just found this pictureonline and I just love it.
'cause I feel like I'vebeen to that room before.
Like, it just feels likea place I've been to.
Um, but, you know, learn fromyour users and ask about them.
So, discords and slack groups are superpopular, being in social networks,
showing up, uh, building an emailrelationship, showing up at conferences.
Uh, like I am right now.
And then also, um, remember that ifyou want to build a community, you
have to provide some sort of valueto people for them to show up and
then they will in return, provide alot of insights about your product,
how they're using it, what their painpoints are, and that sort of thing.
And while I was gonna try to max it30 minutes, I did end up adding a
sixth bonus piece of practical advice.
Which I really recommend you do.
Um, this is somethingI've been doing recently.
Test everything out yourself.
Um, make sure that you test drive.
If you're posting tutorials on howto do things, give it to cloud code
and see how it does give it, um, toget up copilot and see if it's able
to accomplish that sort of thing.
Um, check for gap.
In your code, check for gaps or inyour documentation, make sure AI
is able to actually fetch the URLson your documentation site and get
information from it and not just, uh,fail because you built it with like
some crazy JavaScript, uh, concoction.
Um, so confirm that it canfetch and read your docs.
Analyze user behavior.
Um, again, you still need to watchusers interacting with things.
You still need to learn from themand see even if they're using
ai, where are they getting stuck.
Um, and then also you do need toinventory and prune any content you
have because I think one of the biggestissues we have, especially in WordPress,
I think more than most places, isthere is a lot of outdated content.
Um, I see this at WooCommerce of course,because there's 50 million ways to
build a WooCommerce store, but likethere's a lot of outdated content.
Um, and a lot of that content didreally well, and a lot of that content
is still what's getting served.
So if you're still serving upold documentation and stuff like
that, please don't confuse the ai.
Um, try to inventory and prune yourcontent to figure out what sort of
stuff can be, um, which sort of stuff isactually practical, which sort of stuff
is actually task oriented and which stuff,um, maybe you just don't need anymore.
So in conclusion, we'reall worried about ai.
We're all thinking about howit's going to put us out of a
job, but hang in there baby.
Um.
Don't give up or assume thatAI is gonna make us irrelevant.
There's still just a lot of work, uh,to be done in the world and in software.
I don't think we're done yet.
So I think, uh, all of this stuff that'sbeen important is gonna continue to
be important for a while, but, uh, ifanything now is like a really good time
to focus on a lot of those basics andmaking sure that you're doing things,
uh, right and don't feel like you haveto just try every new thing that exists.
Um, so that's everything.
I'm gonna say thank you q andA. If anything was wrong, it
was AI generated, it wasn't me.
Um, if you have any questions,feel free to raise your hand.
Thank you.
Uh, something you said at the end asfar as, uh, sometimes is really high
ranking, SEO articles of how to do thingswrongly because things have changed.
Uh, I have no idea the answer to this.
Is there.
Do people like in your role, uh, take,try to take responsibility in that regard?
Like, like contact the, thepublishers of that and say, Hey,
can you put a disclaimer for this,that this is no longer accurate?
Particularly when it's superhigh ranking content that is
probably continually misleading.
People, I know you can't takeresponsibility for all the
content, but sometimes there arethings that really, really, uh.
Still rank?
Well,
I mean, if they're using the oldWoo logo, I will email them and let
them know to use the new Woo logo.
No, um, the, uh, yeah, I, I, I, um,yeah, we will, if, if something is,
I mean, it's hard because WordPress,like a lot of people are using the
old way still, and that's fine.
And that's great and it's gonna continue.
So it's like, we don't want, it's, it's,we're in like a tough spot with, uh, the
crazy backward compatibility we have.
But, um, yeah, like.
I know that I will, in my job, I havea few people that I follow and really,
every time a release comes out and Igo through the features, I'll often
search and I'll find, usually it's likeKatie, Keith's website has a, and I'll
be like, Hey, just so you know, there'sa new filter for this that, you know,
makes this like a faster way to do it orsomething like that and send it to them.
And you kind of, uh,hope for best practices.
So yeah, if you feel like youhave a huge community of content
out there and it's outdated andyou're seeing stuff that you know.
Reach out to people.
'cause I don't think anybodywants to deliver outdated content.
I think they would probably wantto have the most relevant content.
Um, I, I hope, yeah.
Okay.
Any other?
Thank you.
Yeah.
So, um, I think the generalconsensus about vibe coating across
the room was, you know, you stillneed to, what was the sentinel was
the, the analogy you made there.
The, the Centar, the Centar human
horse.
Yes.
I apologize, not a Harry Potterperson, but, um, the, I was just
curious from also touching on what yousaid about documentation and legacy
code bases and maintaining Sure.
Things are up to date of like whereyou think we are right now in terms of,
I'll say, calling it vibe documentationmaybe, or something like where the
AI can help you with documentingall those things, or maybe if it has
enough context, can help evaluate safe.
Functions or other parts of theapplication have been changed, but
you're not aware of other impactsin other parts of the code base
that maybe need to be updated?
Yeah, I mean, um, yeah, we wereactually trying that this week.
Um, we have.
I mean, I like even at WooCommerce,it's like there's so many
gaps in the documentation,only so many hours in the day.
And so we've been looking at some of like,there's some of these ones where it's
like put in your repo and it builds likean entire documentation from scratch.
I think that's a really cool idea.
I don't think it's practically useful.
'cause I think part of the concept ofdocumentation too is like what is the
thing you can't get from the code?
And a lot of the questions we get.
At our developer advocacy team is,is often not, how do I do this thing,
but why did you do it this way?
You know, why didn't you make it this way?
And a lot of that really informshow they're gonna build on their
platform, uh, on our platform.
So, uh, but yes, absolutelyyou can use AI to draft things.
Um, I, I think that's a great idea.
I think you definitely should, but.
That there's gotta be that humanelement and a little bit more
of intentionality behind it.
But, um, we're gonna, we, we were justlooking at a few tools, and we're gonna
try some out this week and see if it'seven worth, sometimes AI gives you a
really great first draft and you rewrite80% of it, but hey, you got it done.
Uh, and sometimes it's just, um, you justwanna throw your computer out the window.
So yeah, we'll see.
Yeah.
Here.
It's okay.
Uh, I, well, they
want it for the recordings.
I, uh, it's just an observation.
Uh, back in 1995, um, there wasa search engine called Alta Vista
that was king and it had no adsand it was, everybody used it.
And at the time, uh, there weren't ads on.
Webpage, like there are like oneof the pages you showed today.
Uh, and over the, the next few years,they started adding more ads on Vista
and then came Google around, I thinkit was 1998 or 1999, and Google came
with their clean interface with no ads.
And now AI is coming with no ads.
You notice a trend.
Sorry.
Yeah, we were just talkingabout this outside.
Um, if we could do a talk aboutthe financial structure of AI
and how sustainable it is, um,and how soon we're gonna get ads.
Um, that's definitely a thing.
I mean, even, uh, like I said, likeI work at WooCommerce, um, we're very
much focused on commerce inside of chat.
Like chat, GPT wants to show you productsand they want to get you to buy a
product and never leave chat, GPT and.
There's financial structures andincentives on from everybody that have
to get aligned for that to happen.
But of course it's going to happen.
I think that all thatstuff is gonna happen.
Um, there, I just saw this week an adsupported free chacha, BT kind of clone
launched where you, if you don't wanna payfor Chacha pt, you can get a free version.
And ad supported honestly isgreat for a lot of things.
I think a lot of economies, um.
The where they don't have, maybe theydon't have the currency that we have
in North America, then it's greatthat they can get ad supported stuff.
Um, but yeah, I think we're gonna seeads show up and I think the clean user
experience that I presented, um, at thebeginning, I think that's the free thing
we're getting now to get us all hooked.
And pretty soon the, the AI responseis gonna come with something else.
But, um, but yeah, I don't know ifthe, other than I agree with you.
I don't know if I haveanything to add to it.
The ads are coming.
Sure.
Yeah.
A question here.
So do you think you're gonna see sortof, um, autogenerated Doc, so Map, you
know, you've got a plugin, it's gota load of actions and filters in it.
Um, do you think we're gonna have,you know, click create me a set
of pages for the action of thatpage of action per filter and it
perhaps an example with it as well?
It all happened.
I mean, I think, but that's.
A lot of that is, I mean, a lot of thatis happening now without ai, which is
if the code's documented enough, we canparse it and pull out all the filters
and hooks and all that sort of stuff.
Um, but like I said, I think there'sthe, the part that AI can't tell you
is the part that AI doesn't know, whichis all the more reason you need to have
that written down so that when the nextdeveloper comes to use it, they get all
this stuff because, um, again, I think itcan read code and it can infer stuff, but
it just can't infer a lot of intentions.
And I think those intentionsare what separate.
Um, good documentation from,from better documentation.
But yeah, I think, like I said, Ithink starting with AI as a first
step is absolutely, uh, an approach.
I would try.
So in your research, did youhappen to come across, uh, using
MCP to serve your documentation?
Um, no, I haven't lookedat MCP because again, like.
AI is so good at crawling and like,like the ins, the structures are
there for it to crawl and scrape andpull content from URLs and stuff.
Um, I'm still, I'm not the rightperson to ask on MCP 'cause I'm
still very skeptical so far yetof where it's gonna provide value.
But, uh, I don't know.
That would be interesting.
I-M-C-P-A tool to kind of grab.
Your document, the, the properdocumentation basically,
or the proper information,
serve it up, let the, let theagent ask about the documentation
and then serve up the correct
date.
Yeah.
Instead of it going to a search,search result like it does now.
Yeah.
Hi.
Uh, beyond code documentation, do you,uh, what do you use or recommend as
tooling for project documentation?
Hmm.
You mean just like, uh.
Now the code documentationwill tell you Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This file.
But what about a bigger picture oflike, what are we trying to do with
that project gathering everythinglike the confluences of this world?
Like what do you, what's your experiencewith more project level documentation?
What, what's worked for you and your team?
Yeah.
WW is, uh, as a, they use the word chaos alot, so, um, that's probably not the best.
We're probably not the best example of,uh, organizational, but like I said, I
think there's documentation in your code.
Is important.
I think the next level of an actualdocumentation site where you're,
it's more of a narrative and you'reexplaining that sort of level.
Um, I, I think you mean projectdocumentation in, in terms of
like, here's where to start.
If you're building on this like, likea more of a kind of explaining like
what this plugin does or,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Like in Wu it's kind of like.
I wanna do this thing now.
There's 50 ways to get there,but like that middle step, that's
kind of like, here's the, theworkflows and stuff like that.
Yeah, I think a lot of that ispart of documentation and I think
like that stuff is still important.
As long as I said it's task orientedand it's not just the philosophical
reasons of why a thing was builtor what it's based on and stuff.
If it's to solve a specificuse case, then I think all of
that is, is pretty important inthe documentation site itself.
Probably not the code.
Yeah,
so you, you've given me a lotto think about, about regarding
the documentation today.
And I developed software that'sunder the, uh, G-N-U-G-B-L license.
So I can't really sub chargepeople for this software.
Uh, so what I was thinking is,you know, you charge for support
and you, you charge for access todocumentation and stuff like that.
But what you're saying here today is makeyour documentation available so that the,
the, um, uh, uh, theis can, can index it.
So I'm not sure what todo with that conflict.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's part of the instruct.
The incentive structure ofanybody building on WordPress.
It's like, what do I charge forsince I can't charge for the code?
Um, charging for support is definitelya common thing and I don't think, I
think in terms of your support beingthat good again, I think AI is gonna
be part of support going forward.
I think, um, peopleare start, I know it's.
Hasn't traditionally in the past, butrecently, like people are seeing a lot
of good success using AI as a first pass,um, for any support interaction and stuff.
And so the better that, that supportis, the less chance that a human
has to actually do that work,um, that's gonna save you money.
And so whether the documentation'sinternal, whether it's just for your
team and it's, you work in an agencyand you're just documenting just for
everybody on the team to be the same page,I think all of that's gonna be important.
Um, but I don't, it depends, youknow, WooCommerce is different 'cause
we're a platform, so like we want.
We grow when developersbuild on top of it.
WordPress is a platform and you build,you grow and people build on top of it.
Most products and plugins andWordPress probably aren't platforms
also where they're less concernedwith developers building on top of it.
Um, but I don't know.
I think, I think limiting people fromaccess to how to use your product doesn't
seem like it would help because atthat you're gonna lose them before they
even try it or they might not try it.
Whereas I think support makessense as a thing to, to pay.
Well probably.
But I, I don't know if I wouldpay all the documentation.
'cause if they can't even get upand running, you know, developers
are very, uh, they wanted to seethat the documentation exists,
whether they read it or not.
They want to know that it's there.
They want to know that they canfind the information themselves.
They want to be very independentand they want to get through it.
And they're averse to anythingthat feels like a sales
tactic or something like that.
So if your market is developerspecifically, um, you have to be,
you have to be very clear that like.
Everything is here foryou to do it yourself.
You have to let them be self-startingto get far enough into using
your software for them to wantto stick around because they will
definitely jump off pretty quickly.
Just 'cause developers in particularhave that marketing aversion.
Um,
my software is more end user.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So then that might be different, you know?
Um,
yeah.
So, um, my question relates to oneof the pieces of your advice where
you said don't, um, uh, it wasabout like, you know, putting too
many, like too much code, like, um,example code in your documentation.
Um, and I was thinking of like, likea situation where you have like.
Maybe there's a function thatreturns, you know, some data.
Um, but I don't know if theAI can necessarily know.
You know what, like, let's, let'ssay you have a big object that you're
getting back from ACF or something.
Um, is there a way to sort ofget, like, do like, have AI more
aware of that, you know, the, thedata structure for that return?
Without having the hard, you know, Ifind that when I, when I'm like, let's
say I'm templating, I put that datastructure in a comment, AI's a little bit
smarter about knowing like what, what myintentions are when I'm doing the code.
So I'm wondering if there's anythingthat you found that a place where you
could put, or, you know, the AI could,uh, I guess be more aware of the, like
types of data structures that come back.
Yeah.
And in documentation there's.
Different like genres or differentlike types of documentation and
there's tutorials and guides, um,that are higher level or there's
guides that are higher level, moregiving you like the philosophy, uh,
sort of the project level type stuff.
Then you have tutorials which are morestep by step and they're one task,
and you get from beginning to end.
You're not gonna learneverything about that feature.
You're gonna learn how to get fromA to B with one specific task.
Um, then there's things like referencesand so like in WooCommerce we have.
Our developer documentation.
We also have a rest API referencethat explains exactly all that stuff.
Um, we also have a codex thatexplains every hook and filter
and all that sort of stuff.
And so I think having referenceguides and cross-linking all
that stuff is gonna be important.
And a lot of those things,the references are generally
pretty easy to auto generate.
So I think it makes sense to finda good tool depending on what your
software you're using to like autogenerate the actual reference guides
and to not skip the reference guidepart of it, but that middle step, the
guides and tutorials, that's wherethe kind of human element and the
intentionality behind it kind of come in.
And so I think it's kind ofa mix of those two things.
But yeah, I would definitely.
Um, like you said, being very explicit onwhat parameters come in, what parameters
come out is extremely important.
And we're seeing that with like toolslike MCP, where it's like the more
concrete we can say about input andoutput, the better AI is gonna do.
And so I would continue to keepthose things updated for sure.
All right.
That was my last question, I think.
I think they were cutting me off.
Thank
you everyone.
I know there's more questions,but we are out of time.
Alright.
Thank you all.