Poor Documentation Quality

This cluster centers on complaints about inadequate, incomplete, poorly written, or hard-to-navigate software documentation, with users preferring examples, tutorials, and blogs over official docs.

📉 Falling 0.5x Open Source
6,399
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#9612
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
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2012
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Keywords

LDAP AI HA OP UX IETF ycombinator.com IHMO freebsd.org github.com documentation docs doc official example clojure incomplete quality api hard use

Sample Comments

dozzie Oct 24, 2016 View on HN

Still heavily lacking in documentation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769039). Come back once you write some.

intrasight Oct 10, 2025 View on HN

Documentation is often wrong, incomplete, poorly written.If you only have N hours to work on "documentation", I say spend it on examples.Also AI can probably turn a quality example into a doc whereas it can't turn a doc into a quality example.Another thing to contemplate. I stand here as a 75 kilo entity - an example. I am, IHMO, a good example. The documentation on this example is so far many millions of page long, is very incomplete, certainly wrong, and could not be us

skratlo Oct 20, 2020 View on HN

This should be the top comment, reading through those docs is a terrible experience, I think the author lacks any didactics experience

noisy_boy Dec 7, 2021 View on HN

The best example of being lost in docs is Python's re (regex). Tons and tons of details upfront when I just want to find examples of basic usage. It should have the examples section with common patterns right at the top. If I have a specific requirement or want the gory details, I can always scroll down.

akshatpradhan Apr 1, 2015 View on HN

Why aren't these great books turned into the official documentation if the current official docs are lacking in so much quality?

metalliqaz Nov 21, 2019 View on HN

I find that documentation very difficult to understand.

PudgePacket Nov 3, 2019 View on HN

I disagree on the documentation front. I find the docs hard to use, and missing things.

EdwardDiego Nov 12, 2022 View on HN

I'll be honest, the "full documentation" just being generated API docs isn't great.Just show me how you use it, damnit.

BiteCode_dev Apr 15, 2023 View on HN

You are a great example of the too good to be helpful crowd."Things should have a good doc and you should read it".I could not have come up with a better example in the article.This is just perfect :)

How could some framework be awesome without having good documentation?