This. I actually think just documentation is, well not completely worthless but close to. Imagine telling someone they could learn to weld airframes by reading. Just no.
For software, it’s the maintenance task that’s helped by documentation not building. They still need to know how to build but it’s a lot easier with documentation. I know that when we use software packages we all rely on the documentation to understand how to use it and code our desired behaviors. It’s obvious that our own code can benefit from documentation in the same way.
documentation is required but not sufficient. also, documentation is usually outdated really fast if the person maintaining the system leaves and/or does not care
