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Ninth episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this one, Tom and I talk with Sarah Deaton, a technical writer at Anthropic, about what documentation work looks like when automation handles most content generation: shifting from writing to orchest

A friend of mine recently lost her job in a layoff. She looked at her résumé with a pang of despair and asked me for advice on what she should learn next. She hasn't thrown in the towel on technical writing yet; she wants to find another tech writing job,

While chatting with Sarah Deaton about the formats agents could use to talk to each other, we got to questions that might sound obvious: why should machines (say, LLMs) communicate with each other like we do? Do they need all the rhetoric we carry around?

Docs as code used to mean editing docs as if they were code. Today it also means that docs have become executable , either as agentic instructions, skills, or context for large language models. Tech writers must now ensure that the reference and procedure

In my predictions for 2030 I wrote that tech writers would be using specialized LLMs, running locally on powerful hardware. I see hints of this move to "local first" among engineering pundits, but we're not there yet, in part because of how much more powe

Eighth episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this one, Tom and I talk about what makes documentation genuinely beautiful versus merely functional, how Calvino's literary principles apply to docs, why our role is shifting from creating to judgi

I joined Patrick Bosek on the Behind the Docs podcast to talk about what AI actually means for technical writing. We covered the evolving role of tech writers as architects of tooling and content systems, why AI works better as a collaborator than a repla

Back in 2024 I wrote that AI helps me remove boring work at the margins. This is fine for a lone writer, but how to scale this to an entire team of technical writers? How to make the system helpful but not intrusive? These are all questions I'm starting t

AI is inflicting a proliferation of tools, in the utensils' sense. Folks are conjuring all sorts of programs out of thin air, unrestrained. Someone confessed on Hacker News to having created a hundred custom utilities. Linked to this increase is the promo

Docs are often thought of as a purely functional artifact, a packet of content that, when it works, it's not remembered at all. Those who consume docs, however, can tell whether a manual or docs site pleases their mind and senses in ways that others don't