Skip to main content
Brian Roberg's Blog

o3-mini Is Really Good at Software Documentation (Link)

Simon Willison recently tested OpenAI's relatively-new model o3-mini by pointing it at the source code for his Datasette project (about 14,000 lines) and giving it a very simple prompt:

write extensive documentation for how the permissions system works, as markdown

How did the model do? Willison: “Honestly, the results are fantastic. I had to double-check that I hadn't accidentally fed in the documentation by mistake.”

Check out Willison's post for more details, including the exact cost (to the tenth of a cent) of running the prompt.

If you've ever written software, you know that software documentation is both hugely valuable and a lot of work to write (not to mention maintain). What if we're reaching the point where LLMs can drastically decrease the cost of documentation?