Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995 (passo.uno) AI

An author describes a weekend experiment fine-tuning local LLM adapters to write in late-80s/90s-style software technical documentation, using large quantities of scanned Microsoft manuals from Bitsavers and QLoRA training run via Runpod. The resulting models produced period-appropriate doc formats and vocabulary in tests (including a fictional Win32 API and an anachronistic REST API explanation), with performance varying by model choice, training data size, epoch count, and adapter rank—showing tradeoffs between committing to the “fiction” of the prompt and overfitting or hallucinating. The author frames the approach as style transfer and impersonation rather than a replacement for real documentation.