Optimizing technical docs for LLMs

I felt most of this was just plain common sense. People read things by headings and sub headings. People look for relevant documentation for product x under product x not y. QA and code samples primes the LLM for what most developers like myself hunt for (a quick answer or a simple code snippet). The forum part got me. Seeing as forums tend to be variable in the quality and quantity of info. If the author(s) suggest forums why not discord servers and gitter chat as well? I know of serveral projects where the real documentation, examples and help is locked up on the discord/gitter channels. Also, in the same vein, why not Github PRs/issues as well? Having the LLM diagnose when an issue was cleared up, migration strats, etc. from github PRs/issues (as I've had to use from time to time) would be great too. Of course, Github/Discord/Gitter would require some kind of filtering to make sure it is data worth ingesting into the LLM but if it can identify it was worth ingesting then perhaps it could also suggest to the documentation team something worth documenting.

I love that writing LLM-friendly docs is just... writing good docs. There&#x27;s a ton of overlap between accessibility work and preparing things to be used by LLMs.<p>I wonder if an unintended side effect of this AI hype cycle is a huge investment in more accessible applications.

I wonder how many of these groups went the opposite direction — creating the structure of those web pages by using an LLM?<p>I&#x27;ve (obviously, like almost everyone) experimented with creating stuff with ChatGPT, and… hmm. I was going to write &quot;it made web pages like that&quot;, but: Clever Hans. I don&#x27;t know if I might have subconsciously primed it to, because that&#x27;s also something <i>I</i> like.

Presumably all the structure and section headings that they recommend don&#x27;t have to be rendered by a browser as visible to humans. The LLMs should be smart enough to understand HTML directives that don&#x27;t add a lot of unnecessary visual structure.

This is useful stuff, but it is … <i>familiar</i> …

Isn’t there enough markdown floating around that the LLM can deduce structure from the three levels of headings?

Can I say - For RAG based system using LLM, will it be more effective to structure the source documents in this way?

Author here. Happy to answer any questions!