Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete

[userbinator]

MS started aggressively using AI to generate their documentation a year or two ago. It did not make things better at all, and in fact quite the contrary. Awkwardly verbose wording, contradictory sentences in different paragraphs of the same article, etc. That said, they were already on a trajectory of decline.

[kewun]

You should see the way Claude Code generates documentation. It's pretty good.

[damian2000]

If we can also apply this to network engineers, that would be awesome. No more waiting 2 weeks for a firewall rule. But how many places actually have tech writers these days.. mostly devs will be asked to write documenation.

[aorth]

You guys had tech writers? I write everything myself—from the code to the reports to the policies to the deployment scripts. Well at least I also get to write the firewall rules myself! Sigh...

[rich_sasha]

I spent half a day writing tests against MS SQL where tests would create a separate schema, do their business, then the schema dropped via "DROP SCHEMA ... CASCADE". In the end, thanks to Meat Intelligence on the web I found out there is no CASCADE for MS SQL. But only because blogs and documentation etc were written by people who kinda mostly checked what they wrote.

[stingraycharles]

The problem is that AI generated content always has the same structure and grammatical style, and you absolutely still need to guide it in order to make good content.

Tech writers will become more productive, not obsolete.

[kewun]

But why not have the developer that wrote the code guide the AI to generate the content? They know the code best.

Actually at this rate, developers won't be writing code anyways but they're still in a better position to guide the AI.

[zapperdulchen]

Sure, manually written API docs are a thing of the past. But this has been true even before the era of LLMs. But I'm not that sure that this argument stands for all kinds of software. Depending on the abstraction between your source code and the things your users want to achieve, the expert view of a technical communicator might be necessary in order to come up with instructions (how-to) that meet the needs of the person seeking help instead of just summarizing the software code in natural language.

[returnInfinity]

If the role is eliminated, then the responsibility of the verifying and managing the docs will fall on somebody else.

AI does not take responsibility

[yellow_lead]

AI marketing slop.

> This isn't a minor efficiency gain. It's a fundamental shift

> This isn't theoretical. It works today.

> The documentation stays accurate because it's generated from real code, not someone's memory of how things used to work.

Yes, because Claude never hallucinates.

[esafak]

I've only worked with one tech writer; they have been a dying breed for a long time. Gone are the days when software shipped with doorstopper manuals. Only a big company can justify them now. For the rest, LLMs are good enough.

[EagnaIonat]

This is such a shortsighted and dangerous view. The LLM can only work on what it sees.

[theletterf]

No they're not. My response: https://passo.uno/letter-those-who-fired-tech-writers-ai/

[TYPE_FASTER]

I asked Claude to summarize a legacy codebase yesterday.

Some of it was accurate.

Some of it was not.

[Madmallard]

Doubt it.

People want to interact with other humans.

Hotel doorman problem etc.

[damian2000]

Devs really don't want to work with tech writers to document their code though

[flax]

Oh good. Now the documentation will be written by The Machine That Lies to You. Wonderful. What could possibly go wrong?

[jaggederest]

Now we need The Machine That Never Lies to You and some doors...

[dkuntz2]

lol, lmao, author clearly does not understand what a tech writer (or any writer) actually does and how they're important.

[Uptrenda]

already are