The Documentation Trap
We’re obsessed with documenting everything about AI.
Every parameter, every prompt, every possibility must be captured and preserved. As if perfect documentation will somehow tame this wild new technology.
It won’t.
Documentation is our security blanket in times of rapid change. We think if we can just write it all down, we’ll finally understand it.
But AI doesn’t work that way.
It learns through interaction, through trial and error, through countless iterations of attempt and adjustment. Just like humans do.
When a child learns to walk, we don’t hand them a manual. We let them stumble, fall, and try again.
When we learned to speak, no one gave us complete documentation of grammar rules first. We absorbed language through immersion and practice.
Yet with AI, we’re creating volumes of documentation before we’ve truly learned to walk.
We’re trying to freeze a moving target.
Every detailed guide becomes outdated almost as soon as it’s written. Every carefully crafted prompt template becomes obsolete with the next model update.
The real learning happens in the doing.
In the experimenting.
In the failing.
In the adjusting.
In the breakthrough moments of unexpected success.
Documentation has its place. But it’s not the starting point.
Start with curiosity instead.
Start with questions.
Start with small experiments.
Start with permission to be wrong.
The most valuable AI knowledge isn’t found in documentation – it’s found in the space between attempts. In the patterns that emerge from hands-on experience. In the intuition that develops through active engagement.
Stop writing documentation that will be outdated tomorrow.
Start building experience that will serve you next year.
The best way to understand AI isn’t to read about it.
It’s to work with it.
To play with it.
To let it surprise you.
Documentation captures where we’ve been.
But AI is about where we’re going.
And you can’t document the future before it happens.
The manual you need most is the one you’ll write yourself, through experience.
So close the documentation.
Open the playground instead.
