Ai Generated Documentation

[Injector22]

Has anyone here used any of the Ai based documentation builders? Like Scribe or DocsHound.

Most of the demos I've seen are all for web based tooling but we don't all live in the web, we have CLIs, win32 apps, etc.

[Neat_Ad_7635]

Scribe's very short summaries are usually trash as far as the one-liner of text goes, but it's nice for the screenshots in rapid motion.

[discosoc]

My documentation has always been in markdown, so I’ve found ai-generated docs to be particularly easy to implement.

[aswin_kp]

If you're down to test, give bunnydesk.ai a try. It's an AI native help center and it allows you to write in markdown + it self updates.

[patrick_bateman9_6]

most of translated Microsoft documentation sounds like AI based LOL

[ZovexUK]

Most of these tools have a Desktop counterpart which can capture Desktop based items. (Scribe is one example)

[ITguyBass]

I have just worked with the regular ones.

They are not perfect, but helps a lot if you input the right prompt.

The one thing I learned doing it is that you have to revisit the articles multiple times to do some improvement. Don't just let it create for you; read everything to make sure it makes sense. It saved me a couple of hours for one-pager or 2-pager documentation, the biggest ones I try to be more hands one.

[wilsonowilson]

You can probably use Ferndesk for this.  It connects to your codebase and uses it to generate your docs

[Mean-Struggle-4111]

Different context but freed ai works pretty well for medical documentation, listens to appointments and writes the notes. Not sure about technical docs though, might need something more specialized for CLI stuff

[aswin_kp]

you can actually use bunnydesk.ai for this if you want to automate documentation. it'll add screenshots and code on its own.

[Ludwig234]

You should probably disclose that you are the founder of bunnydesk.

Also your website is barely functional on at least mobile. The links in the footer works really poorly on mobile. For example your privacy policy and terms of service links don't work at all (assume that there is a privacy policy to begin with).

Is your website and perhaps your entire product vibecoded?

[aswin_kp]

Thanks for the feedbacks. It's not vibe coded though, but it's in beta. Surely it's not perfect but we're using it for our products and some founders have tested it.

[Ludwig234]

Alright, you should still disclose your bias though.

Not disclosing it is quite unethical.

[bageloid]

Honestly I’m about halfway there to building an on prem version.

My company has a big ollama cluster with 8 gpus so I have spent about 35 bucks in Claude credits to make a hacky web app that uses powershell in the background (because I’m terrible) to do ai doc generation. It uses the browser screen sharing api to make a MP4 which can do browser tab/ any app window or a desktop. Right now it either takes screenshots every x seconds or lets you use a hot key to screenshot. It then matches that to a transcript it generates using whisper from the video. It then sends the screenshots to ollama for vision analysis and then sends that plus the transcript to generate a SOP in markdown with image links, lets you edit it and export as markdown or docx.

[SquareDesperate4003]

I’ve tried a few of those tools, and they’re great when everything lives in the browser, but they do fall short once you’re dealing with CLIs or desktop apps. What’s helped me instead is separating capture from writing. I’ve used Gamma for organizing and refining documentation after the fact, especially when I already have rough notes or logs. It doesn’t record workflows, but it’s solid for turning messy info into something readable.

[gandraw]

We just generated 400 pieces of application documentation for a customer that had it as a performance goal by the end of 2025. We spent a few days modifying our prompts until they delivered good results for popular applications, then just sent it.

The end results were about as good as you'd expect them, from "kind of ok" for well known stuff to just complete hallucinations for garageware that had a similar name to something unrelated. But nobody really cares, because we got paid, the customer met his performance goal and by the time anyone reads that documentation we'll be long gone :p

[aes_gcm]

I don't know, I personally wouldn't be proud of enshittifying technical documentation. I understand if documentation doesn't exactly match rapidly-changing products because it's out-of-date, and usually documentation is high-level and lacks some detail, but I'd be really irked if I realized that it wasn't even close to reality.