There’s always someone announcing that AI writing is slop. Usually in a comment, usually with some variation of “you can always tell”. I read a lot of those. What strikes me isn’t the argument, since the argument is mostly aesthetic. It’s how familiar the shape of it is. Every significant
Ask most people what a business analyst does and you’ll get an answer about documentation. Writing specs, keeping the traceability matrix current, running things through a change control process. That’s the visible part. The part that actually determines whether a program lands is much less visible, which is sitting with
Most organisations have plenty of documentation. What they don’t have is documentation anyone opens twice. The difference between a work instruction that gets used, versus one that gets written then forgotten, usually comes down to a handful of decisions made before anyone starts typing. Here’s what those decisions look like,
There’s a moment in most process workshops where you notice someone hasn’t spoken. 40 minutes in, everyone else has contributed, they haven’t said a word. The easy read is that they’re not interested. Usually that’s wrong. More often they’re managing something you can’t see from the front of the room.
There’s a moment in most documentation jobs where an engineer explains something clearly, completely, in a way that makes total sense. You take notes, you thank them, you go to write it up. Then halfway through the third step you stop. What happens if the user doesn’t have that permission?
Let’s get the objection out of the way first. Yes, AI helped produce this article. I’ve been a technical writer on and off for nearly 20 years. Government, healthcare, finance, aviation, telecommunications. I use these tools daily. I use them deliberately, without guilt. The argument against doing so doesn’t hold
Every technical writing job has a set of tasks that sit between you, the actual writing. Building an outline. Working out what’s missing from a documentation set. Putting together an example so a concept lands. Editing the same document for the fifth time. None of that is the hard part
There’s a lot of noise about AI in documentation work. Some of it oversells what the tools do, some of it dismisses them entirely. The reality sits in the middle, which is less interesting to write about, though more useful. After a couple of years using these tools daily across
The prediction was that AI would make technical writers unnecessary. A few years in, that hasn’t happened. What has happened is that the slow parts of the job got considerably faster. Research, note taking, first drafts, restructuring, and reformatting. All of that used to take hours. Now it takes minutes,
