Isn’t it better to continue supporting the very well written and detailed pdf documentation and keeping it up to date rather than having a half finished attempt at creating new guides ?
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The new documentation has different goal.
It aims to be a complete reference manual for the program. It will be more difficult to read than the previous one. It’s not written for humans, it’s written for machines. I’m trying to soften the blow by including screenshots so it doesn’t look like wall of text to humans. But screenshots are just eye-candy not serving any technical purpose.
In the future, humans won’t be reading software documentation. Instead, we will use AI being trained on it so it can answer any question you have.
AI is already being trained on new documentation. I’m not yet happy with the results, mostly because I suspect there is still lots of content missing but I’m adding new content daily. There will be a breaking point when AI will be able to accurately answer your questions about Manager.io in any language. That’s the goal I’m aiming for.
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Which AI platform should we use for this?
I asked “Copilot” how to enter starting balances and the instructions were out of date (did not reflect the latest requirement for journal entry) but were accurate for earlier versions, however the instructions were not very comprehensive.
General GPT tools are being trained on text from all over the Internet including this forum. The answers can be out of date because AI models do not give enough weight to “freshness” of the text they are being trained on.
To solve this issue AI needs to be further trained on up to date documentation only so it gives a lot more weight to the information in the documentation and less weight to what is written elsewhere.
In the near future, there will be specialized chatbot you will be able to use directly on Manager.io website. General purpose chatbots won’t give you up to date instructions.
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As a human, and my understanding is the Manager is marketed for human use, that sounds like a terrible idea.
I appreciate good documentation is hard and expensive to generate but that is part of having a good product.
Diagrams are very valuable in human comprehension. I agree they are beyond current machine understanding but that is irrelevant to the task of training humans.
Dropping human readable documentation risk a dramatic increase in other support costs or decreased program overall value.
To be honest the new guides contain very limited useful information. They do say what each button does but I rarely read documentation to work that out.
What they miss is information on how to approach / solve a task. The old documentation contains a lot of information at that level so is far more useful.
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@Patch let’s see what will happen. I do think AI assisted learning is the future. The big idea is that if AI understands every button, every field, every behaviour, then it can generate human-readable guide with examples on any topic and on demand.
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Sorry @Lubos but there are many different learning styles (Google it and see for example https://teach.com/what/teachers-know/learning-styles/ ) that is ways how people learn and interpret information and data. Images help so called visual learners. Your preference supports higher levels of abstraction by reading, which is logical for someone that is a good programmer, but not for someone who has to design user-interfaces and definitely not for accessible user-guides.
The old guides are clearer and much more user-friendly. Also the ability to download them as PDF is good for all those places where businesses are not permanently tethered to the internet because of poor accessibility.
So the intended users of the guides are machines? Why do machines need these?
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I agree with @lubos here
Having a co-pilot within Manager that can read the screen and understand text prompts from the user to provide guidance would be a breakthrough in my opinion.
Two Points:
Fine to have a new way of managing documentation in the future. But as many others have said, why not have the old documentation as the current documentation until the new documentation format is actually ready for production use? This is the biggest problem with the new documentation. It is not usable yet. The old documentation is far better.
Second. AI can be great for getting answers on how to do something. Ask a question and it will give you an answer. But it cannot replace traditional documentation which will tell you about things that you didn’t know that you needed to know. There is a place for both formats. Especially for people like me who like to read the manual before using the program!
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Abundant research on human learning proves you wrong. And why have guides at all, if not for humans?
The reason so many are supportive of the old guides is that they were developed according to the research. The issue is not their effectiveness, but their falling behind the program’s pace of development.
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AI is developing at pace, but it is not ‘intelligent’. it is merely a complex algorithm that takes a mass of input and brings back the commonest denominator. That may be a good thing for ‘how to use this screen’, but not good for ‘blue sky thinking’ i.e. 'how do I best accomplish this new task having regard to legal and audit requirements under the local bye laws, given that the program can do ‘anything’ but I am not allowed to.
While I agree with @lubos that AI will be definitely useful to answer common questions and provide basic examples, what AI fails at is nuance which is usually the case with business specific questions.
And while I can see how AI can help with keeping up with the developments better so than humans–a problem which @Tut brought up, however, AI shouldn’t be the only way for a user to understand the software.
A user with specific needs will see more benefit in reading a comprehensive guide and understanding the system for himself and later designing a solution that solves his problem according to what they understood from the guides than say being mouth-fed a generic solution by the AI, which can be limiting.
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I am ok if @lubos wants to use AI,
as long as there is a guide book that is similar to the old guides.
Cause 1. You look at games, machines, software …
they all use a book/guide that is easy to understand.
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Everyone likes a good user guide/user manual that they can turn to.
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Point me to one topic were more than one person asked for AI learning over book learning.
(I cheated and searched the forum,
there is no topic with more than one person wanting AI learning)
- Based on all of the current info that I have, I found only two people who want AI learning:
Out of about
Which there could be even more manager users that do not use the forum.
My point is @lubos the new AI learning method is not currently wanted,
what most people want is something like the old guides that is better then this:
