The docs are alright¶
Newer generations always have it tough. People say they're too lazy, too online, not trying hard enough. This kind of thing happens with every generation, yet somehow the kids keep turning out alright.
I hear a version of this about software documentation now. AI will write all the docs. Nobody reads docs any more, they ask a chatbot. It's a bad time to be a technical writer.
I don't agree. I've only been a technical writer since 2021, and it's been a strange few years to start in, but I think it's an exciting time to be doing this job.
At the start of this year my colleague left, and I became the only writer on our team. I decided it was the right time to move our help site from six MadCap Flare projects to a single docs-as-code site, and I got more done this year than I thought I could. That's because I could build my own tools: prose linting that knows our house style, checks that run every time I edit a page, and AI agents that review my changes before anyone else sees them.
None of those tools wrote the docs. They handled a lot of the checking, so I could spend more of my time writing. An LLM can tell me a sentence breaks a rule, but it can't tell me whether a page answers the question a reader actually has, or whether a feature makes sense to someone who's never used it. It doesn't care what the docs mean. That's still my job, and I think it's an even more important one now.
This blog is where I'll write about what I'm learning as a technical writer while the job changes: the tools I'm trying, what's worked, what hasn't, and where I still want a human in the loop.
I think the docs are alright.