It’s official! Tom Johnson and I teamed up to start an AI & Docs podcast! We had this idea brewing for a while and finally got to record the thing.| passo.uno
You might have read Annie Mueller’s post poking fun at developers’ tutorials. If you haven’t yet, do it now. On the surface, it’s an exquisite rendition of the kind of technobabble we tech writers get to tame every day. Reactions among devs ranged from nervous snickering to outright shame. Like all the best parodies, Annie’s goes deeper than that, though: It puts a finger on “documentation theater”, a state where docs are performative and not addressing a need nor caring about i...| passo.uno
I sometimes lurk on /r/technicalwriting to gauge the interests and sentiments of the community. What I’ve noticed over the years is that pessimism and anxiety have always been quite high; Reddit, it seems, can be a powerful outlet for all sorts of feelings. Here I’d like to analyze and address some of the challenging ones. If you had similar thoughts, I hope my words will prove useful.| passo.uno
“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!| annie's blog
Docs are a product. Contributing to them is among the finest forms of product engagement. Bystanders can become builders and authors: They contribute a verse so that the powerful play can go on. They cease being the product to become the owners of the product narrative. And in this AI age, where docs matter more than ever, users who write can steer the future of products.| passo.uno
I’ve been noticing a trend among developers that use AI: they are increasingly writing and structuring docs in context folders so that the AI powered tools they use can build solutions autonomously and with greater accuracy. They now strive to understand information architecture, semantic tagging, docs markup. All of a sudden they’ve discovered docs, so they write more than they code. Because AI must RTFM now.| passo.uno
Today I discussed how tech writers can use AI at work with Tom Johnson and Scott Abel. It all started from my post What’s wrong with AI-generated docs, though we didn’t just focus on the negatives; in fact, we ended up acknowledging that, while AI has limitations, it’s also the most powerful productivity tool at our disposal. Here are some of the things I said during the webinar, transcribed and edited for clarity.| passo.uno
I’ve been writing documentation and technical articles for more than a decade now. One piece of feedback I consistently got from managers and peers during all these years is how fast I am when producing and releasing docs. For example, I was once asked to document a new feature from a team I wasn’t serving two weeks ahead of launch. Everything was new to me, but I had most of the docs drafted after four days. By launch, the docs had been deemed ready to go live.| passo.uno
Strategy, Michael Porter wrote, is choosing what not to do. Now, the problem with knowledge work such as the one tech writers carry out is that it’s full of things that seem to require equally important, time-consuming decisions. While engaging in lengthy disquisitions might be alluring, endlessly combing the Zen garden of theory doesn’t solve the basic problem of the docs hierarchy of needs, which is writing the damn docs and making sure they’re accurate and useful.| passo.uno
This last weekend I created another LLM-powered tool, Impersonaid (all puns intended). It’s a docs user simulator: you provide the URL of a document (or its Markdown source), select the virtual persona, and start a conversation about the content. Right after I released it, I realized that I had been talking to an imaginary friend to create more fictional interlocutors to interact with. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. In fact, I would argue this is what writers are meant to do.| passo.uno
A colleague recently asked how I find time to blog about technical writing after hours. The answer is surprisingly simple: I prioritize writing above other things. I could have posted that exchange on social media and called it a day, but there’s more nuance to that simple reply. Let me elaborate, it might be useful.| passo.uno
In what is tantamount to a vulgar display of power, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images that mimic the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime. Something similar happens daily with tech writing, folks happily throwing context at LLMs and thinking they can vibe write outstanding docs out of them, perhaps even surpassing human writers. Well, it’s time to draw a line. Don’t let AI influencers studioghiblify your work as if it were a matter of processing text.| passo.uno
As a psychologist, I’m quite familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s an extremely popular framework for human motivation. The hierarchy, often pictured as a pyramid, states that people look for certain things following a certain order: First shelter, then food, then company, etc. As with most psychological theories, Maslow’s is almost certainly false; nonetheless, it provides a very intuitive way of thinking about priorities.| passo.uno
