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AWS Developer Tutorials - Docs as Test

AWS Developer Tutorials - Docs as Test

A new open source project and new approach to improving documentation quality with generative AI.

Michael Wunderlich

Principal Writer, AWS Documentation
This week we are launching a new open source project from AWS Documentation. This project is a new approach to service documentation that focuses on scalability and resilience. The project uses the Q CLI to make this possible, not by doing the same things that we used to do faster, but by doing new things that were not feasible before. It includes instructions for generating more content and we welcome your contributions.
At launch the repo contains 70 scripts and tutorials for the AWS CLI, covering end-to-end getting started scenarios for 64 services. This content is generated with Q based on existing documentation and samples, and tested and revised by writers. Developing a basic CLI-based tutorial previously required hours of reviewing existing content, testing commands, drafting guidance, and formatting a topic. These steps can now be completed in as little as 15 minutes, and there’s opportunity to automate more steps and generate more types of content from the same sources.
This is a significant improvement in time spent, but that’s not the only benefit. The scripts that the tutorials are built around include error handling, resource tracking and cleanup, and interactive elements that we simply would not have time to build in to samples in the past. And with this approach, we are developing documentation in a new way that aligns with the new ways that developers consume documentation. Developers no longer need to read documentation directly to get answers to their questions. Generative AI reads the content for them and provides answers that are specific to the developer’s context. From the same perspective, we ask Q How do I do this with the AWS CLI? and see if the answer works, with additional instructions for Q to test it and figure out why it doesn’t work.
Now we can take it a step further and ask Q, Do this for me. Make me a script that does this, and make sure it works. This is a new customer perspective for documentation. Approaching documentation from this perspective creates new opportunities for standardization and scaling of content publishing. By mapping customer use cases to API workflows, applying best practices, and addressing issues that arise, we create reference implementations to base future work on and test service functionality. This provides a basis for systematically driving improvements to feature documentation and users experience with Q.
Please try the scripts and tutorials in  the AWS Developer Tutorials repository , and let us know what you think! Also, check out this post highlighting an Amazon RDS use case by Yanjie Niu:  From Development to Deployment: Choosing the Right Database Strategy 
# agentic-ai# documentation# tutorials# shell-scripting# aws-cli
Any opinions in this article are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.
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