August 2025 – Docs by Design
Bob Watson ponders technical writing, API documentation, and the world in general| Docs by Design
Bob Watson ponders technical writing, API documentation, and the world in general| Docs by Design
After publishing my last post, I asked Claude what it thought about it, using the “reflective blog post” prompt I’ve been developing. It appears that we have some more work to do, indeed. Claude reviewed my post in terms of: Basically, I got a report card from my mechanical English teacher. Let’s see how I … Continue reading "AI reflects on my reflection"| Docs by Design
(Full disclosure, unlike recent blog posts, this post was not reviewed or edited by an AI before it was published. What you see is what you get from the real, organic, me.) After the past few articles, I thought I’d pause to reflect for a moment on what I thought about my recent co-writing with … Continue reading "Reflections on co-writing with AI"| Docs by Design
I’m terrible at spotting flaws in my own work. As I iterate through multiple drafts and careful editing, I still tend to lose myself in the details and focus more on the trees than the forest. It’s not uncommon for me to miss weak arguments, unclear explanations, and assumptions that need defending—until after I publish, … Continue reading "Testing antagonistic AI review on my own writing"| Docs by Design
After six months of diving into AI tools, I’m still figuring out how to work with them without compromising my professional integrity. The old boundaries between my words and borrowed words don’t map cleanly onto AI assistance. When AI helps craft my prose, am I still the author? When my students use GPTs (a generative, … Continue reading "Finding the line between AI assistance and AI dependence"| Docs by Design
Google Cloud recently published “Smarter Authoring, Better Code: How AI is Reshaping Google Cloud’s Developer Experience,” describing how they’re applying AI to documentation challenges that every technical writing team recognizes: keeping content accurate, current, and useful for developers working with constantly evolving services. Because AI tools consistently claim to excel at content analysis and summarization, I put … Continue reading "How to get honest answers from AI tools...| Docs by Design
AI represents a technological shift to tech writing. However, tech writers have been dealing with technological shifts for centuries. So, what's one more?| Docs by Design
This weekend, I woke my LinkedIn profile from its hibernation and spent some time bringing it up to date and dusting off the cobwebs. The good news is that it gave me something to blog about! I sent my profile into hibernation last fall for a variety of reasons. The main reason was just to … Continue reading "My AI has a sense of snark"| Docs by Design
A lot has changed in tech writing during the past two years when it comes to LLM tools (a.k.a. AI). That time frame coincides with my tenure teaching API documentation and watching how my students adapt to these tools has given me some insight into how our profession is evolving. More to the point, it’s … Continue reading "Teaching technical writing in an AI world"| Docs by Design
Imagine that you've deployed AI to generate your technical documentation. The tool promised to revolutionize your content workflow, and honestly, it delivered on speed. What used to take days now happens in minutes. Now, fast-forward six months to find customer support is drowning in confused use| Docs by Design
Bob Watson ponders technical writing, API documentation, and the world in general| Docs by Design
Everyone tells aspiring tech writers to find an open-source software (OSS) project to create content for a portfolio. Unfortunately, while popular advice, I haven’t heard that to be very successful. Rather than leave you hunting for those elusive OSS opportunities, I’ll describe how the portfolio project I use in my API documentation course works. This … Continue reading "Do-it-yourself (with a friend) portfolio"| Docs by Design
In a recent AI-generated summary of my academic work on readers' goals and analytics, I realized how technical documentation might not be ready for AI automation until we address the analytics elephant in the room.| Docs by Design
What happens when you feed a 2015 study on developer behavior to today's AI tools? After some time away from my blog, I share what I discovered while updating my API documentation course to incorporate AI tools, and how insights from a 10-year old study matter today more than ever.| Docs by Design
