Agent traffic does not make human-friendly docs obsolete

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:15

   when agents are the ones who are deciding what tools and APIs they should use? And it's not the human who has to decide that. I think the really important takeaway, and this is kind of the perspective that we have, is when we show kind of like the graphs and the numbers about agents versus human traffic, one really easy takeaway to come from that is, hey, you know, like it's mostly going to be agents from a percentage standpoint. Let's only care about agents and stop caring about what it means to build good docs. And I think that is a mistake. Because the reality from what we've also seen is while agent traffic has gone up multiple orders of magnitude, the people who are still visiting sites has actually also grown as well.

2. 3:58

   Really? Yes. by that i think it's more so because there are still more people onboarding and still needing to read content right if you think about what an agent does you need to know what it asks like how to actually ask the right information to actually achieve something sometimes content that still exists needs to be used for browsing purposes thinking that i think that like agents is going to take over all of it and to stop designing for humans it's kind of like saying it's like oh you know we don't need books anymore right you still need to crack open a good book you know even the internet even when the internet you know ai still exists right and so the big takeaway is like i think designing for the human experience at its core is still super important and making sure that you can then layer age experience on top of it is how i think about it

3. 4:48

   what makes good docs has not changed right so your skills of still building really really great content all that's still valuable yeah of course i appreciate that you know i will admit i'm a bit surprised to hear you say that i assume you'd have the opposite take yeah around docs are dead agents are just calling tools they're making all the decisions for us so to hear that docs are not dead humans are still looking at that yeah is that just a right now thing do you think that'll still be true in a year from now i think that's a really good question i think the way that i think about this is imagining what would happen if it's like the extreme version of the world like let's imagine in the world where docs are dead right then maybe you know the way you need to expose your information out to the world is just with like a massive in markdown file and it's only

4. 5:37

   read by agents not really humans and the only way to actually interact with your product is with a chat interface i've seen people try those things but what ends up happening is because when i see that, I'm like, okay, well, this isn't really designed for me to try. It isn't designed for me to use it. I can't even go in and look at the information of what it's trying to do. It's not seeming like it's designed for humans. And I'm not going to try the product. I don't have good things to say about it. Agents aren't going to recommend it because it's not picking up that information for GEO. And so I personally am still very much of the opinion it's important design for both interfaces. Also, because at the end of the day, agents are acting on behalf of humans, right? When you make an agent request, it still is on behalf of a request from a person,

5. 6:24

   and they need to know how to source that information so the human still has the ability to review it. So that's kind of what we think. Interesting. I am curious, though,