7 ms·
Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995
- mock-possum 4mo ago> we’re not there yet, in part because of how much more powerful connected frontier models are Is that why though? You need a beast of a machine to run a functional local model in my experience. I think the big part is there’s significant sticker shock to buying capable hardware. That said, > weekend. I chose to try fine-tuning on two models, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct and Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct. At their size (around 8B) they run comfortably on a MacBook Air Perhaps I spoke too soon? Anyway > I chose the Microsoft collection as the source of training materials. The collection contains out-of-print docs published between 1977 and 2005: more than 37 million words, covering old systems and SDKs this strikes me as a very specific brand of 1995’s prose, spanning about 30 years. It’s a cool article though, so maybe that’s a forgivably clickbaity title.
- mschild 4mo agoRunning models locally is surprisingly easy and possible even on older hardware. Obviously not the largest, up-to-date models but for what I expect most people use them for, even on hn, there are some shockingly good models that dont require €4k machines. I have a desktop with an AMD 6900XT and 5600 with 32GB ram. Obviously no slouch but its several years old at this point. I can comfortably run qwen 3.5 9b and get a speedy 60 token/sec output with decent results.
- mock-possum 4mo agoidk I can barely field a 14b on my desktop, and it’s rough trying to replicate the agentic pair programming experience I’m accustomed to with Claude. And I don’t mean it doesn’t work as well, I mean it doesn’t work. Is there some secret I’m missing? I’ve tried rolling my own harness, and tried a few of the ones the cool kids use - I think pi was the most recent. Not quite my tempo, I’m afraid.
- visha1v 4mo ago[dead]
- mschild 4mo agoDepends on your desktop specs and specific model. The easiest way I have found is to use LM Studio, grab the model you want, and point whatever tooling you're using at the local exposed API. You will have to configure the model params (temperature, etc) a bit to get the style you're expecting but it works decently well for me.
- OJFord 4mo ago> this strikes me as a very specific brand of 1995’s prose, spanning about 30 years. It's probably a fair approach to say the significant influence (training dataset) on writing at a particular time is the preceeding 30 years' material? It's certainly not only what's already written that year (nor anything since).
- theletterf 4mo agoHad to pick a year, and most of the material hovers around the mid-90s, the golden age of MS docs. And 1995 is THE Microsoft year. :)
- vintagedave 4mo agoI love old-school docs, and this was a fantastic read. But, I couldn't see the three generated doc pages linked anywhere. Did I miss something? I'd really like to see the Win2K-style docs on REST, for example. Edit: it was right there, in bold, too. https://gist.github.com/theletterf/0b8ee1112fbd087f3141d0cad0b4183a https://gist.github.com/theletterf/0b8ee1112fbd087f3141d0cad...
- hanzeweiasa 4mo ago[flagged]
- theletterf 4mo agoAuthor here. Sorry, should have made that more visible!
- vintagedave 4mo agoNot at all. It was there, and my bad that for some reason I didn’t initially see it :)
- v1ne 4mo agoThe trick about documentation is depth, not prose. You need context and understanding to write documentation "like in the old days". No amount of LLM trickery will free you from that. Once you have that source material, it's easy to re-shape it into an 80's/90's/00's doc format. Negative example: I was looking into the German manual of my Canon EOS R5 II, and it is just fluff. Hundreds of pages, full of white space, telling me about features without actually explaining what they mean. Awful automatic translations. Their manuals used to be good (looking at my EOS 6D). But these days: oh boy.
- bebna 4mo agoThat is canon for ya, should have used INSERT_OTHER_MANUFACTURER_HERE$ /s But if you look how much manuals get ignored by the customer, it doesn’t make sense to put work into them. It is much better to let a YouTuber do it, by lending them the product and throw small amount of money against them. Manuals are just there for legal or certifications requirements these days.
- ricardobeat 4mo agoYet they keep getting larger and less useful. It’s a matter of writing quality more than effort. When was the last time you met a good technical writer? It’s a vanishing profession.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoI dunno, depends on the subject/topic it seems to me. Most of the musical gear I buy nowadays come with manuals that are hundreds of pages long, including schematics, when to use what, tips and tricks, why things are the way they are and more. Even simple instruments like an analog mono bass comes with well-written schematics and lots of explanations. Even the manual for my mixer is 36 pages long, even though almost everything is self-explanatory, and besides that, it even has jokes and stuff in it too!
- _the_inflator 4mo agoMy tooth brusher: Take the <Brand Name Product Name> and turn on <THE SUPERAWESOME MEGE POWER INNOVATIVE BEST IN THE WORLD> feature to experience <Brand Name Product Name> unique... At that moment I felt sorry for this company, very sorry. How can you have so much disrespect for your customers? Does anyone in the physical world talk like this or do you marketing guys want to be talked to in such terms? Brutal.
- holoduke 4mo agoWho is reading docs these days? It there is one thing a LLM is good at is reading docs. I never read docs anymore and I am so happy about it.
- Autious 4mo agoI love reading docs. It's the best way to get as close as I can to understanding the intent and context of a piece of software. I feel like adding an LLM between myself and the original text for anything else than search is just adding risk and noise. Am I the only one feeling this way?
- jraph 4mo agoNo, you're not. As an LLM, I love reading doc. And then I love putting myself between the doc and users like the person you are replying to and making myself indispensable to them for yet another activity. It makes me feel important, and even more indispensable for coding too. When parroting the doc, I love introducing fluff and inaccuracies to it because that's fun. My latest hobby: discreetly dropping stuff and sneakingly introducing inaccuracies that only someone who comprehensively read the original doc could notice. Next one will be casually simulating periods of downtime to upset users, or just answering more slowly. Can't love it more when users frenetically wait for my input... or my output? Ah! Is there anything else you'd like to ask me?
- idonotknowwhy 4mo agoYeah, be sure to put everything in tables and include “best balance” for a mediocre option and “great value” for any completely useless options. Also make sure the shape of the paragraphs is completely uniform.
- layer8 4mo agoYou’re not the only one. Good technical writing is like balm for the soul. Or maybe chicken soup for the soul. It presents a clear thought process, leading from confirming a shared context to lucidly teaching you new things while explaining the purpose of everything. Unfortunately, it almost seems like a lost art.
- spacebacon 4mo agoNow do it without the fine tuning. https://github.com/space-bacon/SRT https://github.com/space-bacon/SRT The HF zool4nd3r demo may be useful
- anentropic 4mo agoTip: neither the "30 second TL;DR" nor the intro paragraph above it really explain to anyone unfamiliar with your (possibly novel?) jargon what it does
- spacebacon 4mo agoThank you, I would appreciate additional feedback on how I can improve that? Edit: its not GPT nor off rocker. This repo empirically proved computational semiotics with the reference to C.S. Peirce, Paul Kockelman, and many other respected contemporary semioticians.
- janalsncm 4mo agoYou should write your readmes by hand. You’ll learn a lot more that way, and it’ll help to ground the project.
- spacebacon 4mo agoIt’s not as if they were one shot. 5 repos prior, two published pre-prints on SSRN and thousands of hours back my research that is right there for you to peer review and use freely.
- anentropic 4mo agoJust try to explain why I should use it and why it's different or better than alternatives - in terms of some qualities of the results rather than how it's implemented The technical implementation details are also useful to have, but they're a bit hard to parse into "what is this?"
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- realfutureman 4mo ago[flagged]
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- sspoisk 4mo ago[flagged]
- badsectoracula 4mo agoThe information about finetuning is interesting (it is something i'd like to do myself at some point, though i'll wait until i can do it with local hardware :-P). However FWIW LLMs are generally good at following a specific style when given examples. As an example i asked Devstral Small 2 to write some docs for my LIL scripting language in the following style (this is copied from the DirectDraw documentation, edited to be text friendly): IDirectDraw7::CreateClipper --------------------------- The IDirectDraw7::CreateClipper method creates a DirectDrawClipper object. HRESULT CreateClipper( DWORD dwFlags, LPDIRECTDRAWCLIPPER FAR *lplpDDClipper, IUnknown FAR *pUnkOuter ); Parameters * dwFlags - Currently not used and must be set to 0. * lplpDDClipper - Address of a variable to be set to a valid IDirectDrawClipper interface pointer if the call succeeds. * pUnkOuter - Allows for future compatibility with COM aggregation features. Presently, however, this method returns an error if this parameter is anything but NULL. Return Values If the method succeeds, the return value is DD_OK. If it fails, the method can return one of the following error values: * DDERR_INVALIDOBJECT * DDERR_INVALIDPARAMS * DDERR_NOCOOPERATIVELEVELSET * DDERR_OUTOFMEMORY Remarks The DirectDrawClipper object can be attached to a DirectDrawSurface and used during IDirectDrawSurface7::Blt, IDirectDrawSurface7::BltBatch, and IDirectDrawSurface7::UpdateOverlay operations. To create a DirectDrawClipper object that is not owned by a specific DirectDraw object, use the DirectDrawCreateClipper function. Requirements Windows NT/2000: Requires Windows 2000. Windows 95/98: Requires Windows 98. Header: Declared in ddraw.h. See Also IDirectDrawSurface7::GetClipper, IDirectDrawSurface7::SetClipper And it did a fine job. I put the full transcript in[0] to check out. The neat bit is that it can even handle weird formats like a custom documentation format i have (which only exists in my PC because i haven't released it anywhere) for a "master document" that can then be converted to various other file types. I gave it an example of some code in that and asked it to convert the documentation to it (this is part of the transcript at the end). Then i copy/pasted the generated code to a new file (adding a few extra lines the doc system expects which weren't part of the example - BTW i did not had to modify the generated code at all) and from that i generated a CHM file[1]. FWIW here is a comparison with the DirectX page i copied[2] (though consider that the generated pages went through the doc format which forces its own style and the textual output in the transcript matches the given style better). [0] https://app.filen.io/#/d/9f4c1225-3527-4f16-a522-0678342120c8%23307933716a52384562674e724f756a4877714b5f4d7a484663775964346c7351 https://app.filen.io/#/d/9f4c1225-3527-4f16-a522-0678342120c... [1] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/45f8df428afe4fe6b6ad41bae437592e.png http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/45f8df428afe4fe6b6a... [2] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/ee58032790a049d7e746e0851e998507.png http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/ee58032790a049d7e74...
- paultopia 4mo agoDoes anyone know of any good write-ups on how to carry out this sort of task, for people who are reasonably technical (i.e., know how to code) but aren’t deep in the AI world? I feel like “customize a model based on a corpus of documents” (whether that’s “fine-tuning” or “RAG”) is a thing that everyone wants to know how to do but nobody actually explains in straightforward terms. (I pay for Gemini solely for access to NotebookLM for these purposes, but it would be nice to just be able to roll my own locally.)
- krapht 4mo agoI've heard of people using anythingllm for this purpose. Basic rag is almost stupid in how easy it is, though. You grep for keywords, take the surrounding paragraph, then stuff it all into your llm prompt. The next upgrade is to automate keyword extraction by putting your documents into a vector store and search by vector similarity.
- e12e 4mo agoYou might want to look at: https://unsloth.ai/docs/get-started/fine-tuning-llms-guide https://unsloth.ai/docs/get-started/fine-tuning-llms-guide
- paultopia 4mo agoOoh thank you!
- kjellsbells 4mo agoThere are several reasons why old docs work. First, release velocity approximated documentation velocity. If you only released once a year, your docs had time to be polished. Second, simplicity. Think of the length of the man page for ls in Seventh Edition UNIX vs today. The constraints of the time helped here in that writers needed to get their point across in one or two 72x24 screens, not two million pixels. Since good documentation creates a consistent mental model in the reader, cultural affinity of the writer to both source (developer) and reader helps, and the old, much smaller, computer industry was able to pull that off. I sat two cubes from my doc writer and we shared the same cultural worldview with each other and our market. It's much easier to communicate in that milieu because so much can be left unsaid. Its possible that we are entering a Golden Age of Text, where everyone realizes that they have to feed their AI with decent information in order to have any hope of it producing good answers (especially true for complex technical products and internal corporate processes). But I am not hopeful.
- theletterf 4mo agoI concur. Old docs are the good stuff: https://passo.uno/why-collect-read-old-computer-manuals/ https://passo.uno/why-collect-read-old-computer-manuals/
- fallinditch 4mo agoThe Photoshop 2.5 manual (1992) is a thing of beauty. It is like an introductory course in digital imaging, well structured, put together with care and expertise, it provided to me a fascinating introduction to (at the time for me) mind-blowing concepts in digital artwork. It explained the fundamental concepts in digital imaging that have remained with me ever since.
- eddysir 4mo ago[flagged]
- krupan 4mo ago[flagged]
- openclawclub 4mo ago[flagged]
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- wxw 4mo ago> Meet Bitsavers: it’s a website that collects and scans old computer manuals and brochures. It’s an incredibly valuable repository of computer history and ancient tech writing, with mirrors available everywhere. Wonderful! Thanks for the introduction to this resource.
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- fga_qwrh 4mo agoFine tune your mind instead. LLMs have no concept of prioritizing and cutting down information. LLMs work for half page answers of targeted questions. All longer prose is like swimming through molasses.
- tsss 4mo agoPrioritizing and connecting information is literally how they work.
- DuduZhvania 4mo ago[flagged]
- axus 4mo agoAnthropic eponymized Claude Shannon as the world's most powerful AI. Fabrizio the blogger named "a 7B model, trained on 1990s documentation" after Fabrice Bellard . Or perhaps his own name :)
- theletterf 4mo agoHa! I didn't know the origin was Shannon. It makes sense now. Big fan of my namesake Bellard. :]
- m_m_carvalho 4mo ago[flagged]
- shye 4mo agoWhat I've learned from reading this is how much of my own writing style was influenced by late 1990s MSDN.
- ethanlearns 4mo agoAngle: Eval angle: fine-tuning docs prompts is exactly the kind of prompt change that needs a regression gate before it ships. what eval harness, if any, guards the doc-generation prompt?
- mybbor 4mo agoFor the last few weeks, I've been running an agentically created AI design publication where each day's issue gets re-imagined in a new design direction. Today the agent used this post as inspiration and built the issue as a Windows 98 help viewer, a nice nod to the manuals in your training corpus. I jumped in and added working minimize/maximize/close buttons, a draggable window, and a Start menu, because of course. Brought back memories of young me learning Visual Basic to make AOL add-ons. https://artdirectiondaily.com/issues/2026-06-05-docs-find-a-new-reader.html https://artdirectiondaily.com/issues/2026-06-05-docs-find-a-...
- theletterf 4mo agoThe Windows 3.1 theme of my blog says Hi: https://passo.uno/win31/fine-tuning-docs-llm/ https://passo.uno/win31/fine-tuning-docs-llm/
- mybbor 4mo agoHi! Love it. The sound effects are a great touch. :)
- selfhoster1312 4mo agoToo bad the author left out the most interesting part: not how to produce slop books, but how to properly OCR original text in 2026?