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I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job. I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of m
by dividefuel 4y ago
I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job.
I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important.
Instead, I worry about a situation like the one in this post, where some exec thinks that AI can get you XX% of the way there for much less money. I think they would be mistaken, but what hurts my case is that it's inherently extremely difficult to demonstrate the value of technical writers quantitatively.
- chuddington 4y agoI've personally worked on 3 tickets in the last week related to customers not having a proper understanding of how a feature works due to unclear wording in the official docs. The first one took a lot of time to investigate and find out if it was actually behaving the way it should. Good technical writers are very valuable, with ChatGPT tech writers there will be many more situations like mine!
- pythonaut_16 3y agoWere the unhelpful docs written by ChatGPT? Otherwise your story doesn't support your conclusion. It's more likely LLMs will result in better docs for some projects and worse docs for others.
- layer8 3y agoIt really all depends on what an employer values or doesn’t value.
- ericd 3y agoYou can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.
- Workaccount2 3y agoThere will not be technical writers or technical documentation. It will just be whatever the engineers output. Companies will train an LLM on their product and users will simply interface with that AI. Or there will be a common AI (like chatGPT) that companies offer up all their gross engineering speak documentation to train on.
- acuozzo 3y ago> A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. If two consultants named Bob show up in your office place, run.