Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995
Hacker News (AI keywords)·3 days ago·Tutorial
The author builds a corpus from old Microsoft manuals, cleans OCR text, generates instruction-style JSONL examples, and fine-tunes Llama 3.1 8B and Qwen 2.5 7B with QLoRA.
Tests cover malloc(), a fictional Win32 API, and a deliberately anachronistic REST API prompt.
Qwen fine-tunes transfer the period documentation style best, but the experiment also shows hallucination risks, tuning complexity, and why these models augment rather than replace technical writers.