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I have a hunch that technical documentation may be one form of writing that LLMs won't be able to really help with beyond the mundane grammatical/structural adv
by tolerance 1y ago
I have a hunch that technical documentation may be one form of writing that LLMs won't be able to really help with beyond the mundane grammatical/structural advantages that it affords to any other form of writing.
AI is utterly swaggerless and I have a notion that a lot of what people enjoy from technical writing is the vibe they get from the writing; as much as the instruction.
- spondylosaurus 1y agoI'm a little biased, but as a tech writer who doesn't think they'll be made obsolete by swaggerless LLMs any time soon I strongly agree. If you've written enough docs and sufficiently internalized all the stylistic best practices, putting words in order is the easy part; I could do that in my sleep. But technical writing is like 20% writing and 80% research, fact-checking, QA, diplomacy, and searching for (metaphorical) unexploded ordinances that could blow up in users' faces if you don't direct them down the right path. I would guess some of the vibes you mention come down to actual writing style, which I have plenty of opinions on (some of them controversial among my fellow writers!), but I think there's another subtler aspect of reading something that really anticipates your needs as a user and feeling like you're in good hands. It's something I don't always nail, but I always notice when I read docs that do.