Recent posts from the tech docs community
50 recent posts
Banking and financial institutions that must adhere to strict regulatory and supervisory compliance requirements. A CCMS, like the Paligo CCMS, offers a comprehensive solution to overcome these content-related challenges from ensuring compliance to streamlining workflows a...
When I did the research for my recent Agent Skill research paper, I took two approaches to trying to understand the impact of Skills in developer workflows: take a wide, zoomed-out look at Skills across different segments, vertical...
In my post The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI, I mentioned an upcoming presentation I'm giving to students and faculty. I argue that the future of the profession...
I love reading blogs about technical documentation, so much so that I created a collection and aggregated feed of them plus podcasts and newsletters. Here’s how I did it (and how you can contribute).
I’ve been writing a lot about agents and docs lately, and one thing I keep bumping into in conversations is confusion about what “AI-friendly docs” actually means. Someone says their leadership has mandated that docs need to be optimized for AI, and when I...
Why a Leading IT Company Needed an AI Bot As the company’s teams grew and projects multiplied, internal knowledge became the engine of productivity — yet in practice, it was hard to access. Documents were scattered across network drives, abandoned wikis, sprawling Confluenc...
I recently appeared as a guest on the World Brain: No Experts podcast, episode 5, titled 'Three tech writers and a photographer walk into a bar (with Tom Johnson and Floyd Jones).' We chat about a range of AI-related topics in a fun, conversational way. The podcast tries to an...
If the best way to maintain accurate documentation is to draw canonical data from the product source code, how does one get started moving from having duplicate or triplicate sources of truth to a truly single source?
Last December, quite unrealistically, I took a solemn oath: I would not write again about AI for at least another year. I was growing tired with the incessant noise, the lack of stability, and the self-imposed stress of keeping up with all the attention we must spend on fac...
I’ve been posting a lot of content lately and having a lot of conversations with people in various roles as a result. One message was from someone who I think was in a similar position to a lot of us right now. As I traded messages with them, I realized that becau...
My thoughts on my implementation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for documentation, and what came after.
For some generative AI has felt like a liberation. At long last they can communicate in a way that is heard and understood.
A year of integrating AI into an API documentation course revealed three durable categories for thinking about AI in technical writing—supporting content, generating content, and writing for AI readers—plus three principles for deciding when to use it. The categories and princ...
After posting about Agent-Friendly Docs, I got some very good questions that I wanted to dig into. I love the documentation community - such thinkers! So today, I present my spelunking in the agent Web F...
"MCP" was everywhere and I had no idea what it actually was — and I teach API documentation. So I did what I always do when something doesn't click from the outside: I built one. Three hours and a Python server later, the mystery evaporated. It was just middleware, but very us...
Over recent months, we’ve been using AI to conduct a monthly survey that tracks hiring demand for Technical Authors across the UK. Here are the results for February 2026. Overall job volumes The February total rose by about 695 positions, a gain of roughly 16% compare...
I'm giving a presentation at Louisiana Tech University on March 30, 2026, on what I'm calling the cyborg model of technical writing. The tldr is that I feel the emerging model for tech writing isn't one in which AI replaces tech writers; instead, it's one in which AI augmen...
AI tools need the same accessibility practices that serve vision-impaired readers: descriptive alt text, complete transcripts, explicit visual descriptions. AI can't extract images from web pages or process video directly—they rely on text alternatives. Every requirement Claud...
Imagine you have a large user guide for a game or an application. You can create it the old-fashioned way — in Word, emailing files back and forth, arguing about which version is the latest, and manually merging changes. Or you can manage documentation the same way develope...
Catch a Technical Author on the wrong day, and you hear them complain about spending hours tracking down a Subject Matter Expert who’s perpetually in meetings, or having to rewrite the same section three times because the source information kept changing. In a manufac...
Recently I wrote a post on Running headless Codex CLI inside Claude Code, which describes a way to use Codex models in a headless way when you have Claude Code installed on your local machine. I ended up creating a skill for it where Claude Code will ask you to go through a se...
Code examples need pedagogical principles that help human developers: progressive complexity, clear syntax, explicit comments, authentic errors. Claude's patterns align with instructional design research on cognitive load and scaffolding. The article introduces a three-level s...
AI needs writing quality that serves humans: clear topic sentences, explicit connectives, concrete nouns, consistent terminology. Claude's helpful patterns matched technical communication textbooks. Common problems like pronoun chains, ambiguous referents, and passive voice co...
Although I don't write much about psychology, I've recently become fascinated by a technique I learned, similar to cognitive decentering but with a slight variation. The technique works quite well, though I'm still refining it and understanding it. So this is a brief sketch of...
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, held February 15, 2026. ...
AI tools need information architecture principles technical writers have used for decades. Claude prioritizes heading hierarchy, semantic HTML, and purposeful organization—all established practices from the 1980s-1990s. Organized content matters more than specific technology. ...
Claude introduced Agent Skills in fall 2025, and they have quickly become the next hot thing in AI-assisted development. Agent Skills give your AI buddy just-in-time context to help it succeed with tasks that require specific domain expertise or resources. Anthropic release...
We researched the indicators that suggest something was written by AI. We then asked Claude to create an article about it, in that style. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using AI to write content. Use matters more than the tool itself. It depends on context, how...
I have both Claude Code CLI and Codex CLI installed on my local machine. I often use Codex to code review or tighten the code on something I am working on. Claude has a better a terminal UI, which is not only pleasing to use, but it respects my terminal app's theme. Switching ...
Vibe coding has its place, but as of now I am not among the developers who think good software can be reliably produced when “nobody touches the code”.
As technical writers and documentarians we help facilitate awesome.
Imagine a DevOps engineer at a fast-growing fintech firm starting their Monday: they sift through outdated Confluence wikis for the latest Kubernetes configs, dig up static PDFs buried in email threads and Slack channels, and comb through Zendesk tickets just to answer a ro...
When two companies merge, the announcement typically focuses on synergies, market share, and shareholder value. What gets far less attention, until it becomes a problem, is the intricate work of actually integrating two distinct organisations into a functioning whole. At th...
We now support serving llms.txt files from the root of your documentation domain. This makes it easy to provide …
I wrote about tracking Codex tokens usage recently, and the same tool works for Claude Code. Different command though: shell
While I’ve been looking for my next professional thing, I’ve been working on a community organization side project. The idea is to support a community group with recurring events, allowing people to come together to share skills, knowledge, and build relationshi...
I use Codex for both code-related and non-code tasks in Cursor and in the terminal. I wanted a better way to track Codex token usage day by day. Recently, I learned about @ccusage/codex, which reads your local Codex logs and spits out a table of exactly how many tokens you use...
I recently migrated from Cursor to VS Code. Cursor's agentic code integration was a huge part of my daily workflow. If you're switching from Cursor to VS Code, the migration is straightforward. There are a few steps to get it right.
tldr: Software development is evolving rapidly. The industry is moving from manual coding to AI-assisted development and automation. This creates unprecedented documentation needs. Documentation is shifting from a “nice-to-have” to a critical requirement for pro...
How a real-world need led to the design of an NPM-distributed plugin that automates structured data generation for SEO and GEO.
Turning dense policy documents into effective training materials is time-consuming. L&D teams spend weeks on this challenge. What if you could create interactive quizzes, realistic role-play scenarios, and clear study guides in seconds? We’ve built a procedure-to-...
Welcome to the first newsletter of 2026! I hope your year is off to a good start, full of cooperative colleagues, generous deadlines, and bug-free docs sites. What more could you want?
Most teams treat documentation as reference material—something users check when they’re stuck. But documentation can be much more than that. It’s an early warning system for product issues, a window into user confusion, and a source of insights that often surfac...
Join us at the next Write the Docs London Meetup Join us for an honest, practical conversation about what to automate, what not to, and how to stay relevant as the tools keep changing. This event is aimed at technical writers and those working in closely related roles. The ...
As a senior manager, you might occasionally question whether your organisation truly needs formal policies and procedures. After all, you’ve built a successful business through adaptability, quick decision-making, and trusting your team’s judgement. However, as organisation...
My love of RSS is something I’m not shy about. I think it’s a pretty excellent one-to-many communication tool. But what’s interesting is if you look at its history, it had one major flaw (that’s also partly why I love it). And in many people’s ...
The technical writing profession in the UK is changing. With the median salary for Technical Authors reaching £45,000, many professionals are wondering whether formal certifications offer genuine return on investment – or if practical experience alone suffices. This a...
I have been using Git for all my career in the tech. I am habitual of the basic commands such as git add, commit, status, log and a few more that I use consistently. Yes, until last week, I had never once used or heard about git shortlog. Sometimes you want to know who actuall...
In this issue, you'll find a few ways you can identify if someone really is an "A" player, and you'll explore a tool that lets you monitor your web applications. But first, you'll look at why understanding programming language syntax isn't enough.