13 ms·

To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

• deleted 9mo ago
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• 6stringmerc 9mo ago
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  • bregma 9mo ago
    I'll bring the popcorn.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• aurareturn 9mo ago
  But you might not need 5 tech writers anymore. Just 1 who controls an LLM.
  • theletterf 9mo ago
    Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?
    • amelius 9mo ago
      Yes. But they are now called managers.
    • ap99 9mo ago
      Yes and no. Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less. It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while. If both leave then you're screwed. If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.
      • marginalia_nu 9mo ago
        This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3. Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more. This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.
    • aurareturn 9mo ago
      Yes. That could be said for engineers as well. If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1. I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies. IE: 2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers 2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.
      • SturgeonsLaw 9mo ago
        There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers
        • gjm11 9mo ago
          The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the thing they were already arguing against adds nothing to the discussion.
          • deleted 9mo ago
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        • aurareturn 9mo ago
          Why do you think this outcome is more likely?
          • oldjim798 9mo ago
            Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.
            • aurareturn 9mo ago
    • matwood 9mo ago
      That assumes your backlog is finite. Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?
      • DeborahWrites 9mo ago
        Yes. Yes it is.
      • imtringued 9mo ago
        The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce.
    • raincole 9mo ago
      We have been seeing this happen in real time in the past two years, no?
    • ekidd 9mo ago
      Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years. I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better. Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while. But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention. Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.
      • aniou 9mo ago
        "And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day". Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
        • jason_oster 9mo ago
          > Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? Try it. The pattern matching these things do is unlike anything seen before. I'm writing a compiler for a language I designed, and LLMs have no trouble writing examples and tests. This is a language with syntax and semantics that does not exist in any training set because I made it up. And here it is, a machine is reading and writing code in this language with little difficulty. Caveat emptor: it is far from perfect. But so are humans, which is where the training set originated. > I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas. That just does not follow for me. We're in an era where advancements in technology continues to be roughly quadratic [1]. The implication you're giving is that the advancements are a step function that will soon (or has already) hit its final step. This suggests that you are unfamiliar or unappreciative of how anything progresses, in any domain. Creativity is a function of taking what existed before and making it your own. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", and all that. None of that is changing just because some parts of it can now be automated. Stagnation is the very last thing I would bet on. In part because it means a "full reset" and loss of everything, like most apocalyptic story lines. And in part because I choose to remain cautiously optimistic. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run
• murderfs 9mo ago
  I don't think I've ever seen documentation from tech writers that was worth reading: if a tech writer can read code and understand it, why are they making half or less of what they would as an engineer? The post complains about AI making things up in subtle ways, but I've seen exactly the same thing happen with tech writers hired to document code: they documented what they thought should happen instead of what actually happened.
  • saagarjha 9mo ago
    Not everyone wants to write code.
    • murderfs 9mo ago
      Yeah, but almost everyone wants money. You can see this by looking at what projects have the best documentation: they're all things like the man-pages project where the contributors aren't doing it as a job when they could be working a more profitable profession instead.
      • saagarjha 9mo ago
        While I do appreciate man pages, I don't think they are something I would consider to be "the best documentation". Many of the authors of them are engineers, by the way.
  • deleted 9mo ago
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  • DeborahWrites 9mo ago
    You sound unlucky in your tech writer encounters! There are plenty of people who can read code who don't work as devs. You could ask the same about testers, ops, sysadmins, technical support, some of the more technical product managers etc. These roles all have value, and there are people who enjoy them. Worth noting that the blog post isn't just about documenting code. There's a LOT more to tech writing than just that niche. I still remember the guy whose job was writing user manuals for large ship controls, as a particularly interesting example of where the profession can take you.
• sehugg 9mo ago
  The best tech writers I've known have been more like anthropologists, bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. With this perspective they often give feedback that makes the product better.
  • TimByte 9mo ago
    AI can help with synthesis once those insights exist, but it doesn't naturally occupy that liminal space between groups, or sense the cultural and organizational gaps
  • oenton 9mo ago
    > bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. At my work (FAANG) tech writers are being let go and their responsibilities are being pushed on developers, who are now supposed to “use AI” to maintain customer facing documentation. Is this the promise land? It sure doesn’t feel like it.
• NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
  Meh. A bit too touchy feely for my taste, and not much in ways of good arguments. Some of the things touched on in the article are either extreme romanticisations of the craft or rather naive takes (docs are product truth? Really?!?! That hasn't been the case in ages, with docs for multi-billion dollar solutions, written by highly paid grass fed you won't believe they're not humans!)... The parts about hallucinations and processes are also a bit dated. We're either at, or very close to the point where "agentic" stuff works in a "GAN" kind of way to "produce docs" -> read docs and try to reproduce -> resolve conflicts -> loop back, that will "solve" both hallucinations and processes, at least at the quality of human-written docs. My bet is actually better in some places. Bitter lesson and all that. (at least for 80% of projects, where current human written docs are horrendous. ymmv. artisan projects not included) What I do agree with is that you'll still want someone to hold accountable. But that's just normal business. This has been the case for integrators / 3rd party providers since forever. Every project requiring 3rd party people still had internal folks that were held accountable when things didn't work out. But, you probably won't need 10 people writing docs. You can hold accountable the few that remain.
  • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    I love AI and use it daily, but I still run into hallucinations, even in COT/Thinking. I don't think hallucinations are as bad as people make it out to be. But I've been using AI since GPT3, so I'm hyper aware.
    • nstart 9mo ago
      Yea. I think people underestimate this. Yesterday I was writing an obsidian plugin using the latest and most powerful Gemini model and I wanted it to make use of the new keychain in Obsidian to retrieve values for my plugin. Despite reading the docs first upon my request it still used a non existent method (retrieveSecret) to get the individual secret value. When it ran into an error, instead of checking its assumptions it assumed that the method wasnt defined in the interface so it wrote an obsidian.shim.ts file that defined a retrieveSecret interface. The plug-in compiled but obviously failed because no implementation of that method exists. When it understood it was supposed to used getSecret instead it ended up updating the shim instead of getting rid of it entirely. Add that up over 1000s of sessions/changes (like the one cursor has shared on letting the agent run until it generated 3M LOC for a browser) and it's likely that code based will be polluted with tiny papercuts stemming from LLM hallucinations
• ainiriand 9mo ago
  And here I am, 2026, and one of my purposes for this year is to learn to write better, communicate more fluently, and convey my ideas in a more attractive way. I do not think that these skills are so easily replaced; certainly the machine can do a lot, but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life. In my humble opinion we will be losing that from people, the upscaling of skills will be lost for sure, but the human upscaling is the real loss.
  • jraph 9mo ago
    > but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life. Yep, and reading you will feel less boring. The uniform style of LLMs gets old fast and I wouldn't be surprised if it were a fundamental flaw due to how they work. And it's not even sure speed gains from using LLMs make up for the skill loss in the long term.
    • duskdozer 9mo ago
      Seriously. It wasn't always this way, but now as soon I notice the LLM-isms in a chunk of text, I can feel my brain shut off.
      • jraph 9mo ago
        You're absolutely right! It's not just the brain shutoffs—it's the feeling of death inside.
        • duskdozer 9mo ago
          Sure! Here are some ways you can deal with the feeling of death inside, otherwise known as "brain shutoffs": <list of emoji-labeled bold headers of numbered lists in format <<bolded category> - description>> Is there anything else I can help you with?
          • 9mo ago
• DeborahWrites 9mo ago
  Yeah. AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement. The companies with the best docs will absolutely still have tech writers, just with some AI assistance. Tech writing seems especially vulnerable to people not really understanding the job (and then devaluing it, because "everybody can write" - which, no, if you'll excuse the slight self-promotion but it saves me repeating myself https://deborahwrites.com/blog/nobody-can-write/ https://deborahwrites.com/blog/nobody-can-write/) In my experience, tech writers often contribute to UX and testing (they're often the first user, and thus bug reporter). They're the ones who are going to notice when your API naming conventions are out of whack. They're also the ones writing the quickstart with sales & marketing impact. And then, yes, they're the ones bringing a deep understanding of structure and clarity. I've tried AI for writing docs. It can be helpful at points, but my goodness I would not want to let anything an AI wrote out the door without heavy editing.
  • Nextgrid 9mo ago
    > it won't be a GOOD replacement See my other comment - I'm afraid quality only matters if there is healthy competition which isn't the case for many verticals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631038
  • FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
    > AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement. [insert Pawn Stars meme]: "GOOD docs? Sorry, best I can do is 'slightly better than useless.'"
    • topaz0 9mo ago
      with the occasional "much worse than useless" thrown in as a bonus
  • shiroiuma 9mo ago
    >AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement. That's fine, though: as long as the AI's output is better than "completely and utterly useless", or even "nonexistent", it'll be an improvement in many places.
• InMice 9mo ago
  Is it expected that LLMs will continue to improve over time? All the recent articles like this one just seem to describe this technology's faults as fixed and permanent. Basically saying "turn around and go no further". Honestly asking because their arguments seem to be dependent on improvement never happening and never overcoming any faults. It feels shortsighted.
  • marcosdumay 9mo ago
    > Is it expected that LLMs will continue to improve over time? By whom? Your expectations aren't the same everybody has.
    • InMice 9mo ago
      I dont have any expectations. Thats why I was asking
      • marcosdumay 9mo ago
        Well, expectations vary widely. On one hand, recent models seem to be less useful than the previous generation of them, the scale needed for training improved networks seems to be following the expected quadratic curve, and we don't have more data to train larger models. On the other hand, many people claim that what tooling integration is the bottleneck, and that the next generation of LLMs are much better than anything we have seen up to now.
  • LtWorf 9mo ago
    The LLM can't actually use the product and realise that the description is wrong.
• drob518 9mo ago
  The best tech writers I have worked with don’t merely document the product. They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems. They are invaluable. The best also know how to start with almost no engineering docs and to extract what they need from 1-1 sit down interviews with engineering SMEs. I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.
  • falcor84 9mo ago
    > I don’t see AI doing either of those things well. I think I agree, at least in the current state of AI, but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing. I did have some limited success with getting Claude Code to go through tutorials (actually implementing each step as they go), and then having it iterate on the tutorial, but it's definitely not at the level of a human tech writer. Would you be willing to take a stab at the competencies that a future AI agent would require to be excellent at this (or possibly never achieve)? I mean, TFA talks about "empathy" and emotions and feeling the pain, but I can't help feel that this wording is a bit too magical to be useful.
    • drob518 9mo ago
      I don’t know that it can be well-defined. It might be asking something akin to “What makes something human?” For usability, one needs a sense of what defines “user pain” and what defines “reasonableness.” No product is perfect. They all have usability problems at some level. The best usability experts, and tech writers who do this well, have an intuition for user priorities and an ability to identify and differentiate large usability problems from small ones.
      • falcor84 9mo ago
        Thinking about this some more now, I can imagine a future in which we'll see more and more software for which AI agents are the main users. For tech documentation, I suppose that AI agents would mainly benefit from Skills files managed as part of the tool's repo, and I absolutely do imagine future AI agents being set up (e.g. as part of their AGENTS.md) to propose PRs to these Skills as they use the tools. And I'm wondering whether AI agents might end up with different usability concerns and pain-points from those that we have.
• nicbou 9mo ago
  I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I experience a foreign public transit system. I improve my writing by walking in my readers' shoes and experiencing their confusion. Empathy is the engine that powers my work. Most of my information is carefully collected from a network of people I have a good relationship with, and from a large and trusting audience. It took me years to build the infrastructure to surface useful information. AI can only report what someone was bothered to write down, but I actually go out in the real world and ask questions. I have built tools to collect people's experience at the immigration office. I have had many conversations with lawyers and other experts. I have interviewed hundreds of my readers. I have put a lot of information on the internet for the first time. AI writing is only as good as the data it feeds on. I hunt for my own data. People who think that AI can do this and the other things have an almost insulting understanding of the jobs they are trying to replace.
  • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    >insulting As as writer, you know this makes it seem emotional rather than factual? Anyway, I agree with what you are saying. I run a scientific blog that gets 250k-1M users per year, and AI has been terrible for article writing. I use AI for ideas on brainstorming and ideas for titles(which ends up being inspiration rather than copypaste).
    • nicbou 9mo ago
      My whole comment was about the need for a thinking, feeling human being. Is it surprising that I am emotional about it?
      • speed_spread 9mo ago
        Funnily, of all your comment, the only word I objected to was the one right before "insulting": "almost". Thinking that LLM can replace humans outright expresses hubris and disdain in a way that I find particularly aggravating.
• pydanny 9mo ago
  https://daniel.feldroy.com/ https://daniel.feldroy.com/
  • Antibabelic 9mo ago
    What is this? Your website? How is it relevant to the post?
    • gjm11 9mo ago
      There's another HN thread specifically asking people for links to their personal websites. I suspect an accidental typing-in-the-wrong-reply-box issue.
• MORPHOICES 9mo ago
  [dead]
• codesparkle 9mo ago
  It’s not so much that AI is replacing “tech writers”; with all due respect to the individuals in those roles, it was never a good title to identify as. Technical writing is part of the job of software engineering. Just like “tester” or “DBA”, it was always going to go the way of the dodo. If you’re a technical writer, now’s the time to reinvent yourself.
  • viraptor 9mo ago
    The specialisations will always exist. A good software engineer can't replace a good tester, DBA, or writer. There are specific extra skills necessary for those roles. We may not need those full skills in every environment (most companies will be just fine without a DBA), but they sure are not going away globally. You're going to get some text out of a typical engineer, but the writing quality, flow, and fit for the given purpose is not going to come close to someone who does it every day.
  • EagnaIonat 9mo ago
    > Technical writing is part of the job of software engineering. Where I work we have professional technical writers and the quality vs your typical SW engineer is night and day. Maybe you got lucky with the rare SW engineer that can technical write.
• aniou 9mo ago
  First, we've fallen into a nomenclature trap, as so-called "AI" has nothing to do with "intelligence." Even its creators admit this, hence the name "AGI," since the appropriate acronym has already been used. But, when we use "AI" acronym, our brains still recognize "intelligence" attribute and tend to perceive LLMs as more powerful than they actually are. Current models are like trained parrots that can draw colored blocks and insert them into the appropriate slots. Sure, much faster and with incomparably more data. But they're still parrots. This story and the discussions remind me of reports and articles about the first computers. People were so impressed by the speed of their mathematical calculations that they called them "electronic brains" and considered, even feared, "robot intelligence." Now we're so impressed by the speed of pattern matching that we called them "artificial intelligence," and we're back to where we are.
• vasco 9mo ago
  With every job replaced by AI the best people will be doing a better job than the AI and it'll be very frustrating to be replaced by people that can't tell the difference. But most people aren't that great at their jobs.
• ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  Good points. I suspect a lot of folks are asking ChatGPT to summarize it… I can’t imagine just letting an LLM write an app, server, or documentation package, wholesale and unsupervised, but have found them to be extremely helpful in editing and writing portions of a whole. The one thing that could be a light in the darkness, is that publishers have already fired all their editors (nothing to do with AI), and the writing out there shows it. This means there’s the possibility that AI could bring back editing.
  • groovy2shoes 9mo ago
    as a writer, i have found AI editing tools to be woefully unhelpful. they tend to focus on specific usage guidelines (think Strunk & White) and have little to offer for other, far more important aspects of writing. i wrote a 5 page essay in November. the AI editor had sixty-something recommendations, and i accepted exactly one of them. it was a suggestion to hyphenate the adjectival phrase "25-year-old". i doubt that it had any measurable impact on the effectiveness of the essay. thing is, i know all the elements of style. i know proper grammar and accepted orthographic conventions. i have read and followed many different style guides. i could best any English teacher at that game. when i violate the principles (and i do it often), i do so deliberately and intentionally. i spent a lot of time going through suggestions that would only genericize my writing. it was a huge waste of my time. i asked a friend to read it and got some very excellent suggestions: remove a digressive paragraph, rephrase a few things for persuasive effect, and clarify a sentence. i took all of these suggestions, and the essay was markedly improved. i'm skeptical that an LLM will ever have such a grasp of the emotional and persuasive strength of a text to make recommendations like that.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
      Thanks! That makes a lot of sense, but right now, the editing seems to be completely absent, and, I suspect, most writers aren’t at your level (I am sure that I’m not). It may be better than nothing.
• motbus3 9mo ago
  I like the post but we can learn from insurance companies. They have AI finding reasons to reject totally valid requests They are putting to court that this is a software bug and they should not be liable. That will be the standard excuse. I hope it does not work.
• Havoc 9mo ago
  All valid points but I fear our brave new world cares not
• prakashn27 9mo ago
  I have not fired a technical writer, but writing documentation that understands and maintains users focus is hard even with llm. I am trying to write documentation for my start up and it is harder than I expected even with llm. Kudos to all technical writer who made my job as software engineer easier.
• friartuck69 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • marstall 9mo ago
    are you talking about the hashes (##, ###) etc in the subheadings? I think that's an intentional design thing, a bit of a nod to the back row, if you will.
• throwaw12 9mo ago
  I will share my experience, hopefully it answers some questions to tech writers. I was terrible writer, but we had to write good docs and make it easy for our customers to integrate with our products. So, I prepared the context to our tech writers and they have created nice documentation pages. The cycle was (reasonably takes 1 week, depending on tech writer workload): 1. prepare context 2. create ticket to tech writers, wait until they respond 3. discuss messaging over the call 4. couple days later I get first draft 5. iterate on draft, then finally publish it Today its different: 1. I prepare all the context and style guide, then feed them into LLM. 1.1. context is extracted directly from code by coding agents 2. I proofread it and 97% of cases accept it, because it follows the style guide and mostly transforms my context correctly into customer consumable content 3. Done. less than 20 minutes Tech writers were doing amazing job of course, but I can get 90-95% quality in 1% of the time spend for that work.
  • arionmiles 9mo ago
    If you're getting such value out of LLMs, I'm intrigued to learn more about what exactly it is that you're feeding them. People boast about the gains with LLMs all the damn time and I'm sceptical of it all unless I see their inputs.
  • anonymous_sorry 9mo ago
    Your docs are probably read many more times than they are written. It might be cheaper and quicker to produce them at 90% quality, but surely the important metric is how much time it saves or costs your readers?
• EagnaIonat 9mo ago
  Nice read after the earlier post saying fire all your tech writers. Good post. One thing to add is that the LLM doesn't know what it can't see. It just amplifies what is there. Assumed knowledge is quite common with developers and their own code. Or the more common "it works on my machine" because something is set outside of the code environment. Sadly other fields are experiencing the same issue of someone outside their field saying AI can straight up replace them.
  • theletterf 9mo ago
    > after the earlier post saying fire all your tech writers What post was that?
    • EagnaIonat 9mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628484
• theshrike79 9mo ago
  Documentation needs to be tested. Someone has to turn off their brain completely and just follow the instructions as-is. Then log the locations where the documentation wasn't clear enough or assumed some knowledge that wasn't given in the docs.
• alameenpd 9mo ago
  This was sooo well written (that’s the point I guess)
• billy99k 9mo ago
  Getting emotional about it won't work. Companies only see results. If replacing your job with AI works, your job will be replaced.
• TimByte 9mo ago
  The failure mode isn't just hallucinations, it's the absence of judgment: what not to document, what to warn about, what's still unstable, what users will actually misunderstand
• stackedinserter 9mo ago
  > So here’s my request for you: Reconsider Why should I hire a dedicated writer if I have people with better understanding of the system? Also worth noting that like in any profession the most writers are... mediocre. Especially when you hire someone on contract. I had mostly bad experience with them in past. They happily charge $1000 for a few pages of garbage that is not even LLM-quality. No creativity, just pumping out words. I can chip in like $20 to pay some "good writer" that "observes, listens and understands" for writing documentation on something and compare it with LLM-made one. "Write a manual for air travel for someone who never flew. Cover topics like buying a ticket, preparing for travel, getting to airport, doing things in the airport, etc" Let's compare!
  • the_af 9mo ago
    > Why should I hire a dedicated writer if I have people with better understanding of the system? Many engineers are terrible at documentation, not just because they find it boring or cannot put it into words (that's the part an LLM could actually help with) but because they cannot tell what to document, what is unneeded detail, how best to address the target audience (or what is the profile of the target audience to begin with; something you can tell an LLM but which it cannot find on its own), etc, etc. The Fine Article goes into these nuances; it's the whole point of it. > "Write a manual for air travel for someone who never flew. Cover topics like buying a ticket, preparing for travel, getting to airport, doing things in the airport, etc" Air travel is a well-known thing, surely different from your bespoke product.
• Starlevel004 9mo ago
  Hey Claude, summarise this letter for me and write a response.
• ninalanyon 9mo ago
  I remember the days when every large concern employed technical writers and didn't expect us programmers and engineers to write for the end users. But that stopped decades ago in most places at least as far as in house applications are concerned, long before AI could be used as an excuse for firing technical writers.
• elzbardico 9mo ago
  A somewhat related anecdote: Two years ago, I asked chatgpt to rewrite my resume. It looked fantastic at a first sight, then, one week later I re-read it, and feel ashamed to have sent it to some prospective employers. It was full of cringe inducing babble. You see, for an LLM there are no hierarchies other than what it observed in their training, and even then, applying it in a different context may be tricky for them. Because it can describe hierarchies, relationships by mimicry, but it doesn't actually have a model of them. Just an example: It may be able to generate text that recognizes that a PhD title is a step above from a Master’s degree, but sometimes it won't be able to translate this fact (instead of the description of this fact) into the subtle differences in attention and emphasis we do in our written text to reflect those real world hierarchies of value. It can repeat the fact to you, can even kind of generalize it, but it won't take a decision based on it. It can, even more now, get a very close simulation of this, because relative importance of stuff would have been semantically capture, and it is very good at capturing those subtle semantical relationships, but, in linguistic terms, it absolutely sucks at pragmatics. An example: Let's say in one of your experiences, you improved a model that detected malignancy in a certain kind of tumor images, improving its false negative rate to something like 0.001%, then in the same experience you casually mention that you tied the CEOs toddler tennis shoes once. Given your prompt to write a resume according to the usual resume enhancement formulas, there's a big chance it will emphasize the irrelevant tennis lace tying activity in a ridiculously pompous manner, making it hierarchically equivalent to your model kung-fu accomplishments. So in the end, you end up with some bizarre stuff that looks like: "Tied our CEO's toddler tennis shoes, enabling her to raise 20M with minimal equity dilution in our Series B round"
  • squigz 9mo ago
    You had an LLM rewrite your resume, and then sent it to employers... without proofreading it? That was certainly a choice.
    • inanutshellus 9mo ago
      Tut tut, judgemental one. The point is the sharing - with us - let's not discourage that. After all, if he didn't feel foolish for it, he wouldn't've held it in his memory, and thus wouldn't've shared it with us. Who among us hasn't written an angry email, re-(re-)read it, smugly hit send, slept on it, then regretted the sending?
• j45 9mo ago
  The fired writers should get together start their own publications. AI can’t generate insights far beyond what it’s trained on. Their writing will be a different moat.
  • leosanchez 9mo ago
    > The fired writers should get together start their own publications. What if the next version of AI model gets trained on their work ?
    • j45 9mo ago
      Just like when google started - get ahead, and stay ahead. Google returns the best result based on both it's calculations, and click history of what clicks were most successful for a search. LLM's don't really have that same response partially because it's strength is writing one sentence many different ways. The many different ways to write a sentence doesn't mean it's the best way. If it can write deep sentences, keeping a coherent, connected arc through sentences and stories LLMs' also generally return the "best" answer as the most "common" one, without weight towards outliers as easily that might be the most true, or the best. The definition of what is "good" and "correct" can also vary quite a bit, especially with writing. AI can be configured to look for patterns humans might not see, but we also know humans can see things and scenarios that LLM's aren't trained on and can miss getting to. As we can tell with AI copy, it all starts to sound the same even if it's new. Real writing ages differently. It can be much more of a finger print. This is an area I'm hoping to learn more about from the talented writers in my life - it seems the better the writer, the more they can see the holes of LLM and also be the best power users of LLMs by their superior ability to use words whether they realize it or not.
• jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  I'm currently in the middle of restructuring our website. 95% of the work is being done by codex. That includes content writing, design work, implementation work, etc. But it's a lot of work for me because I am critical about things like wording/phrasing and not hallucinating things we don't actually do. That's actually a lot of work. But it's editorial work and not writing work or programming work. But it's doing a pretty great job. Having a static website with a site generator means I can do lots of changes quickly via agentic coding. My advise to tech writers would be to get really good at directing and orchestrating AI tools to do the heavy lifting of producing documentation. If you are stuck using content management systems or word processors, consider adopting a more code centric workflow. The AI tools can work with those a lot better. And you can't afford to be doing things manually that an AI does faster and better. Your value is making sure the right documentation gets written and produced correctly; correcting things that need correcting/perfecting. It's not in doing everything manually; you need to cherry pick where your skills still add value. Another bit of insight is that a lot of technical documentation now has AIs as the main consumer. A friend of mine who runs a small SAAS service has been complaining that nobody actually reads his documentation (which is pretty decent) and instead relies on LLMs to do that for them. The more documentation you have, the less people will read all of it. Or any of it. But you still need documentation. It's easier than ever to produce it. The quality standards for that documentation are high and increasing. There are very few excuses for not having great documentation.
• osigurdson 9mo ago
  >> liability doesn’t vanish just because AI wrote it I think this is going to be a defining theme this year.
• tlogan 9mo ago
  However, the writing is on the wall: AI will completely replace technical writers. The technology is improving rapidly, and even now, with proper context, AI can write technical documentation extremely well. It can include clear examples (and only a very small number of technical writers know how to do that properly), and it can also anticipate and explain potential errors.
• GuB-42 9mo ago
  AI works well for one kind of documentation. The kind of documentation no one reads, that is just here to please some manager, or meet some compliance requirement. These are, unfortunately, the most common kind I see, by volume. Usually, they are named something like QQF-FFT-44388-IssueD.doc and they are completely outdated with regard to the thing they document despite having seen several revisions, as evidenced by the inconsistent style. Common features are: - A glossary that describe terms that don't need describing, such as CPU or RAM, but not ambiguous and domain-specific terms, of which there are many - References to documents you don't have access to - UML diagrams, not matching the code of course - Signatures by people who left the project long ago and are nowhere to be seen - A bunch of screenshots, all with different UIs taken at different stages of development, would be of great value to archeologists - Wildly inconsistent formatting, some people realize that Word has styles and can generate a table of contents, others don't, and few care Of course, no one reads them, besides maybe a depressive QA manager.
  • asah 9mo ago
    not true! it's read by other LLMs! /s
    • pgwhalen 9mo ago
      Not sure why the /s here, it feels like documentation being read by LLMs is an important part of AI assisted dev, and it's entirely valid for that documentation to be in part generated by the LLM too.
      • asah 9mo ago
        tbh, I added /s because HN can be obnoxious and short-sighted.
  • glemion43 9mo ago
    I let it generate README.md files for my projects and they look awesome and they read nice and are theoretically helpful for everyone new. And LLM are really good in reading your docs to help someone. So I make sure to add more concrete examples into them
• burroisolator 9mo ago
  "Productivity gains are real when you understand that augmentation is better than replacing humans..." Isn't this where the job losses happen? For example, previously you needed 5 tech writers but now you only need 4 to do the same work. Hopefully it just means that the 5th person finds more work to do, but it isn't clear to me that Jevons paradox kicks in for all cases.
• Barathkanna 9mo ago
  I agree with the core concern, but I think the right model is smaller, not zero. One or two strong technical writers using AI as a leverage tool can easily outperform a large writing team or pure AI output. The value is still in judgment, context, and asking the right questions. AI just accelerates the mechanics.
• maxdo 9mo ago
  I’m on engineering side . We are in the same boat. Writers become more productive = less writers needed not 0 but less. That’s current step. Now if the promise of cursor that capable of Multi week system to be automated completely. All the internal docs become ai driven . So only exception are external docs . But … if all software is written by machine there are no readers . This obviously a vector not a current state :( very dark and gloom
• adrian_b 9mo ago
  While I agree with the article, the reducing of the number of technical writers due to the belief that their absence can be compensated by AI is just the most recent step of a continuous process of degradation of the technical documentation that has characterized the last 3 decades. During the nineties of the last century I was still naive enough to believe that the great improvements in technology, i.e. the widespread availability of powerful word processors and the availability of the Internet for extremely cheap distribution will lead to an improvement in the quality of technical documentation and to easy access to it for everybody. The reverse has happened, the quality of the technical documentation has become worse and worse, with very rare exceptions, and the access to much of what has remained has become very restricted, either by requiring NDAs or by requiring very high prices (e.g. big annual fees for membership to some industry standards organization). A likely explanation for the worse and worse technical documentation is a reduction in the number of professional technical writers. It is very obvious that the current management of most big companies does not understand at all the value of competent technical writers and of good product documentation; not only for their customers and potential customers, but also for their internal R&D teams or customer support teams. I have worked for several decades at many companies, very big and very small, on several continents, but, unfortunately only at one of them the importance of technical documentation was well understood by the management, therefore the hardware and software developers had an adequate amount of time planned for writing documentation in their schedules for product development. Despite the fact that the project schedules at that company appeared to allocate much more time for "non-productive tasks" like documentation, than in other places, in reality it was there where the R&D projects were completed the fastest and with the least delays over the initially estimated completion time, one important factor being that every developer understood very well what must be done in the future and what has already been done and why.
  • wagwang 9mo ago
    The obvious explanation is that the pace of writing software has speed up 100x but documentation has remained slow... until now.
    • adrian_b 9mo ago
• beej71 9mo ago
  I think using AI for tech documentation is great for people who don't really give a shit about their tech documentation. If you were going to half-ass it anyway, you can save a lot of money half-assing it with AI.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• agentultra 9mo ago
  A lot of this applies to programming as well. And pretty much everything people are using GenAI for. If you want to see how well you understand your program or system, try to write about it and teach someone how it works. Nature will show you how sloppy your thinking is.
• threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  Im not kidding when I say the tone feels AI generated. It’s obviously not AI generated but I’m more speaking to the tonality of the latest gpt. It’s now extremely hard to tell the difference.
  • theletterf 9mo ago
    Author here. I'm human. I wrote the full thing. :)
    • threethirtytwo 9mo ago
      What’s the point of confirming? AI can lie and so can humans as well. I believe you but that’s just a gut feeling. I guess the best way to put this is anyone can write what you wrote with AI and claim it wasn’t written by AI.
      • theletterf 9mo ago
        Prove it.
        • threethirtytwo 9mo ago
          I can do more, I told the AI to make it "better": The decision to stop hiring technical writers usually feels reasonable at the moment it’s made. It does not feel reckless. It feels modern. Words have become cheap, and documentation looks like words. Faced with new tools that can produce fluent text on demand, it is easy to conclude that documentation is finally solved, or at least solved well enough. That conclusion rests on a misunderstanding so basic it’s hard to see once you’ve stepped over it. Documentation is not writing. Writing is what remains after something more difficult has already happened. Documentation is the act of deciding what a system actually is, where it breaks, and what a user is allowed to rely on. It is not about describing software at its best, but about constraining the damage it can do at its worst. This is why generated documentation feels impressive and unsatisfying at the same time. It speaks with confidence, but never with caution. It fills gaps that should remain visible. It smooths over uncertainty instead of marking it. The result reads well and fails quietly. Technical writers exist to make that failure loud early rather than silent later. Their job is not to explain what engineers already know, but to notice what engineers have stopped seeing. They sit at the fault line between intention and behavior, between what the system was designed to do and what it actually does once released into the world. They ask the kinds of questions that slow teams down and prevent larger failures later. When that role disappears, nothing dramatic happens. The documentation still exists. In fact, it often looks better than before. But it slowly detaches from reality. Examples become promises. Workarounds become features. Caveats evaporate. Not because anyone chose to remove them, but because no one was responsible for keeping them. What replaces responsibility is process. Prompts are refined. Review checklists are added. Output is skimmed rather than owned. And because the text sounds finished, it stops being interrogated. Fluency becomes a substitute for truth. Over time, this produces something more dangerous than bad documentation: believable documentation. The kind that invites trust without earning it. The kind that teaches users how the system ought to work, not how it actually does. By the time the mismatch surfaces, it no longer looks like a documentation problem. It looks like a user problem. Or a support problem. Or a legal problem. There is a deeper irony here. The organizations that rely most heavily on AI are also the ones that depend most on high-quality documentation. Retrieval pipelines, curated knowledge bases, semantic structure, instruction hierarchies: these systems do not replace technical writing. They consume it. When writers are removed, the context degrades, and the AI built on top of it begins to hallucinate with confidence. This failure is often blamed on the model, but it is really a failure of stewardship. Responsibility, meanwhile, does not dissolve. When documentation causes harm, the model will not answer for it. The process will not stand trial. Someone will be asked why no one caught it. At that point, “the AI wrote it” will sound less like innovation and more like abdication. Documentation has always been where software becomes accountable. Interfaces can imply. Marketing can persuade. Documentation must commit. It must say what happens when things go wrong, not just when they go right. That commitment requires judgment, and judgment requires the ability to care about consequences. This is why the future that works is not one where technical writers are replaced, but one where they are amplified. AI removes the mechanical cost of drafting. It does not remove the need for someone to decide what should be said, what must be warned, and what should remain uncertain. When writers are given tools instead of ultimatums, they move faster not because they write more, but because they spend their time where it matters: deciding what users are allowed to trust. Technical writers are not a luxury. They are the last line of defense between a system and the stories it tells about itself. Without them, products do not fall silent. They speak freely, confidently, and incorrectly. Language is now abundant. Truth is not. That difference still matters.
• jr-throw 9mo ago
  None of the ten or so staff tech writers I have worked closely with over the years have honestly been great. This has been disappointing. Always had to contract external people to get stuff done really well. One was a bored CS university professor, another was a CTO in a struggling tiny startup who needed cash.
• 1980phipsi 9mo ago
  How is this for an ordering: Good human written docs > AI written docs > no docs > bad human written docs
• nlawalker 9mo ago
  This was at #1 on the front page like an hour ago, and now after almost 100 new comments it’s off the front page at #40. What happened?
  • theletterf 9mo ago
    I don't know how this works. @dang might have an explanation?
  • dang 9mo ago
    The answer could be: (1) users flagged it; (2) mods downweighted it; and/or (3) it set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. In this case it was #3. That's one of the ways the system autocorrects. A sensational/indignant post attracts upvotes because that's how upvotes work (this is a weakness of the upvoting system), and this triggers an overheated discussion, which trips the flamewar detector which penalizes the post. It's about as simple a feedback mechanism as a thermostat. That's why it's not uncommon for something to be at #1 and have tons of upvotes and comments, and then suddenly plummet. We do review all the threads that get that particular penalty but sometimes it takes a while. Edit: ok, I've reviewed it. In this case, the thread is actually pretty good. I'm not sold on the article*, but a good thread is enough to turn off the flamewar penalty in this case, and I've done so. (* not a judgment about article quality in general, only about how good a fit it is or isn't for HN)
    • theletterf 9mo ago
      Thanks for the explanation!
• entontoent 9mo ago
  Was anyone else confused by this title? I thought it was saying "a letter to those who fired tech writers because they were caught using AI," not "a letter to those who fired tech writers to replace them with AI." The whole article felt imprecise with language. To be honest, it made me feel LESS confident in human writers, not more. I was having flashbacks to all of the confusing docs I've encountered over the years, tightly controlled by teams of bad writers promoted from random positions within the company, or coming from outside but having a poor understanding of our tech or how to write well. I'm writing this as someone who majored in English Lit and CS, taught writing to PhD candidates for several years, and maintains most of my own company's documentation.
  • ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
    Given the steady parade of headlines on HN about workers supposedly being replaced by AI, it seems fairly self-evident that the first interpretation is the less likely of the two.
• tmvnty 9mo ago
  I’m already seeing colleagues at work using AI to generate documentations and then call it a day. It’s like they are oblivious to how _ugly_ and _ineffective_ the AI generated AI slops are: - too many emojis - too many verbose text - they lack the context of what’s important - critical business and historical context are lost - etc.. They used AI to satisfy the short-term gain: “we have documentation”, without fully realising the long-term consequences of low quality. As a result, imo we’ll see the down spiral effects of bugs, low adoption, and unhappy users.
  • shiroiuma 9mo ago
    >I’m already seeing colleagues at work using AI to generate documentations and then call it a day. It’s like they are oblivious to how _ugly_ and _ineffective_ the AI generated AI slops are: I'm sure their slop looks FAR better than the garbage my coworkers write. I really wish my coworkers would use AI to edit their writing, because then it might actually be comprehensible.
• NemoNobody 9mo ago
  Ahh, that was well written by a human, well done! If that was more technical tho, like something more similar to technical writing... I would have had Copilot summarise it for me. You are correct, the future is collaborative with AI, but not everything will still need to be collaborative... Technical writing, like manuals and whatnots, that is simply akin to a math problem that, post calculator, has always calculated by calculators - even by people who didn't need them. It will not be better, there is absolutely loss, it will still happen.
• MarkusAllen 9mo ago
  [dead]
• lubujackson 9mo ago
  Based on the trajectory of LLMs I bet a good tech writer will soon be a more valuable engineer than a "leetcode-hard" engineer for most teams. Obviously we still need people to oil the machine, but... a person who deeply understands the product, can communicate shortcomings in process or user flows, can quickly and effectively organize their thoughts and communicate them, can navigate up and down abstraction levels and dive into details when necessary - these are the skills LLMs require.
• gettingoverit 9mo ago
  Not their manager here, but We fired our professional tech writers. They've been using AI all the time (with horrible results), and were basically incapable of tech writing without it at all. Looking for tech writers on the market is nigh impossible. Even people with decent portfolio tend to be very bad at their job. The only good option now is to hire a software developer to do the writing. There's a decent amount of them who have experience with that. Obviously devs won't like to have it on their CV instead of proper development. Honestly this is a catastrophe. If you're firing a tech writer that writes something even semi-decent, you're ruining your business. Reminder: AI is only good at things that existed in bulk during its training, such as README files, configs that always look the same (package.json, dockerfile), and tests. The documentation for your product, or for products of that kind, or even in general, either never existed, or not such a commodity to have AI generate it well.
  • theletterf 9mo ago
    So you're generalizing from your bad experience and your less than optimal recruitment process.