Posted by theletterf 1/15/2026
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.
What post was that?
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
At best there may have been a doubling of the speed, though something like +50% is much more likely.
Between e.g. 1980 and 1995 the speed of writing documentation has increased much faster than the speed of writing programs has ever increased, due to the generalization of the use of word processors on personal computers, instead of using typewriting machines.
Many software projects might be completed today much faster than in the past only when they do not start from zero, but they are able to reuse various libraries or program components from past projects, so the part that is actually written now is very small. Using an AI coding assistant does exactly the same thing, except that it automates the search through past programs and it also circumvents the copyright barriers that would prevent the reuse of programs in many cases.
This is not writing something new for scratch, but just using an already existing framework, with minor customization for the new project.
Writing an essentially new program, which does something never accomplished before, proceeds barely faster today than what could be done in 1990, with a programming environment like those of Microsoft or Borland C/C++.
But most people aren't that great at their jobs.
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.
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)