What Do Humans Need From Docs?

When an agent can explain anything, should we keep writing docs for humans? A few weeks ago I posted, “No one wanted to write documentation, but everyone is writing skills.” Anthropic describes Skills as, “folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that [an agent] loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks.” At first blush this sounds more complex than it is; in reality skills are stupidly simple. ~95% of the time they’re just Markdown, one file or a few, organized in folders that allow for progressive disclosure. You know, kinda like docs. Why do people write skills, but not docs? So why are people happily churning out skills after resisting doc writing for decades? I think there are a few reasons: The agent does most of the work. Most skills are written by pointing an agent at a codebase, reference materials, or a chat session. Sometimes we don’t even read these files! A quick gloss over the summary is fine if it’s just for you. You can iterate as you use it.…