The doc bot goes in the same category as asking a human who has read the docs. In order of helpfulness you could get:
- "Oh yeah just write this," except the person is not an expert and it's either wrong or not idiomatic
- An answer that is reliably correct enough of the time
- An answer in the form "read this page" or quotes the docs
The last one is so much better because it directly solves the problem, which is fundamentally a search problem. And it places the responsibility for accuracy where it belongs (on the written docs).
I think the name, doc-bot, is just bad (actually I don’t know what Shopify even calls their thing, so maybe the confusion is on the part of the author of the post, and not some misleading thing from Shopify). A bot like that could fulfill the role of the community forum, which certainly isn’t nothing! But of course it isn’t the documentation.