Posted by theletterf 13 hours ago
But most people aren't that great at their jobs.
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.
AI can’t generate insights far beyond what it’s trained on.
Their writing will be a different moat.
What if the next version of AI model gets trained on their work ?
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.
Hopefully they used AI to write this.
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.
The other way around. For example the Python C documentation is full of errors and omissions where engineers described what they thought should happen. There is a documentation project that describes what actually happens (look in the index for "Documentation Lacunae"): https://pythonextensionpatterns.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ind...
Also, the primary task of a tech writer isn't to document code. They're supposed to write tutorials, user guides, how to guides, explanations, manuals, books, etc.
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.