Recent posts from the tech docs community
50 recent posts
Interested in career coaching from an experienced documentation leader? Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ Your documentation is feeding machines now. Is it machine-ready? In this episode of Technical Writing Uncensored, I sit down with Mic...
Since 2023, Cherryleaf has been conducting an annual survey into the use of AI in technical communications. The aim is to help people see what has changed over time, and how quickly or slowly things are changing. We publish the findings each time on our blog. We’ve just ...
Google describes Omni as “Nano Banana for video”. This means a single AI model handles text, images, and audio together. Previously, Google used separate models for each, which limited consistency and made editing across multiple clips difficult. With Omni, you can...
Conveying knowledge is different from ordinary communication. It's easy for either clarity or detail to get lost in AI responses. The post Knowledge isn’t communication appeared first on Story Needle.
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 and ...
A new sales employee’s first week with complex CRM software often follows a familiar pattern: constant switching between the application and separate training documents, mounting frustration, and tasks that take far longer than they should. In-app help breaks this cycle ...
This is a handy dandy little website that has all sorts of paper types (lined, music, grid, calligraphy etc.) that you can choose from, set up your preferences for colour, size etc. then download (as various file types) and print — for free: https://paperme.pixzens.com/e...
In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli sat in exile and wrote the most ruthlessly practical guide to power ever committed to paper. He wasn’t interested in how things should work. He was interested in how they do. Five centuries later, most SaaS companies treat their user documentation ...
Interested in breaking into tech writing, interview prep, or other coaching: Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ The best content design is invisible. The worst? You bounce and never come back. In this episode of Technical Writing Uncensored...
In this episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast, Ginny Critcher talks with Ben French, leadership development consultant and business coach, about what it really takes to transition an organisation from founder-led to a more structured, process-driven way of working. Drawing on thei...
As users pile instructions into AI bots, it's getting harder to understand what bots are supposed to be doing. The post Agent fatigue and the death of simplicity appeared first on Story Needle.
You spent months building a documentation portal. Hundreds of topics, organized structure, accurate content. Then a user asks ChatGPT about your product and gets a confident, wrong answer, because the AI couldn’t read your portal at all. If AI tools can’t read your...
Il David di Michelangelo in dettaglioBy Robert Delwood, a Lead API Documentation WriterThinking like a developer to the rescue. Again. And again.This is the second part of an API documentation page critique. See Part I.There is more to API documentation writing than just writi...
Over recent months, we’ve been using AI to conduct a monthly survey that tracks hiring demand for Technical Authors across the UK. The market for documentation professionals remains broadly stable. Demand for Technical Writer roles has eased slightly, while Technical Author ro...
This post is my review of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0, a book we read in the AI Book Club. Tegmark, an MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute, says Life 1.0 relies entirely on biological evolution to change its hardware and software, Life 2.0 (humanity) can desig...
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Our discussion explores Tegmark's visions of superintelligence, the unpredictability of AI goals and subgoals, and how the Asilomar principles fare ...
I typically get client files emailed as attachments, but sometimes they’ll link to the document on their SharePoint server. Emailed attachments are easy—right-click and ‘save attachments’, then virus check before opening. But SharePoint links are a diff...
For my recent Write the Docs talk, I needed a docs site that felt real enough to demo against. I didn’t have a convenient API lying around to document, so I built a toy API and a full docs site on top of that; overengineered, but did what I wanted and it was a fun side quest. ...
Interested in breaking into tech writing, interview prep, or other coaching: Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ What if the person who cares most about accessible documentation is the one who's always needed it? Kiran 'Rin' Oliver is a prod...
I recently gave a talk at Write the Docs about three git commands I’d been avoiding for most of my career, or in two cases didn’t know existed at all. For the demo environment behind the talk, I built All Caps as a Service, a fake API and docs site that turned into its own si...
Our AI usage is quickly pivoting from copiloting to autopilot. Time for people to define their relationship with bots. The post Setting boundaries for bots appeared first on Story Needle.
I've been running Oh My Zsh (OMZ) on every workstation I've ever owned. It was one of the first things I'd install when setting up a new machine or cleanly updating an existing one. For years, I've blindly copied my workstation configuration from one Macbook to the next, witho...
What Is Architecture Documentation? Architecture documentation describes the design and structure of a software system. It captures the system’s high-level components, their relationships, and the major decisions that shaped how the system is built and operated. It answe...
Many technical writers have experimented with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini, but experimenting is not the same as integrating. How do you turn those one-off prompts into reliable workflows that genuinely improve documentation quality and reduce manual effort? This webina...
You may have heard of Merlin, a fantastic mobile app that can identify birds in real time.
Organizations have been pushing official company skills out the door because skills look like just a markdown file, and that seems simple and trivial. But when you dig into the lifecycle of an official skill that you intend to support, distribute, and stand behind, it's a lot ...
Back in 2024 I wrote that AI helps me remove boring work at the margins. This is fine for a lone writer, but how to scale this to an entire team of technical writers? How to make the system helpful but not intrusive? These are all questions I’m starting to answer now, partly t...
We’re pleased to announce a new bonus for delegates enrolling in the certificate version of our Using Generative AI in Technical Writing elearning course. What’s new? Anyone who signs up for the certificate version of the course will now receive a free pack of elev...
Most of how I’ve customized Claude Code so far has been on the side that changes what it knows or does: CLAUDE.md for project conventions, path-scoped rules for specific instructions, skills for specialized behaviors, hooks for guardrails. A separate set of customization knobs...
In January 2025, I shared an update on updating the blog theme and code block themes. The Astro setup that builds this blog uses Shiki, which makes it easier to switch between any supported code theme. What about the blog's primary and accent colors?
Diagrams and flowcharts are visual tools that teams use to create process flows, network diagrams, system models, and visuals from text, data, Excel, code, or ideas. They support collaboration, AI features, templates, shapes, cloud apps, security, sharing, planning, and docume...
In the last ~6 months, Agent Skills have gone from a new feature introduced by Claude Code to a widely adopted paradigm across the industry. Companies that want to signal they understand customer AI adoption and consider it as part of the developer experience have been publish...
AI is inflicting a proliferation of tools, in the utensils’ sense. Folks are conjuring all sorts of programs out of thin air, unrestrained. Someone confessed on Hacker News to having created a hundred custom utilities. Linked to this increase is the promotional noise: Not a da...
As IT systems grow in complexity, clear developer documentation has become a cornerstone for teams to work efficiently. A simple README is no longer sufficient; developers, DevOps engineers, QA, and even product managers require comprehensive resources to understand, use, and ...
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The Boring Internet is a wonderful post by Terry Godier about what’s dying and what remains as the internet changes. It echoes my own sentiments about RSS surviving its own death. The core idea is that we shouldn’t care about the platforms, even if they once offered us conveni...
We’re pleased to announce a significant update to Cherryleaf’s Using Generative AI in Technical Writing elearning course. This update brings more ways to build practical, real-world skills. More practice, more confidence Learning by doing is central to effective el...
We are happy to announce that we added support for the latest Ubuntu 26.04 LTS version released in April …
Hello to all of my fellow documentation lovers out there. May is blossoming all around me, and I hope it is for you and that you have some time to stop and enjoy the beauty you can find.
As I have been re-scoring documentation sites with my updated afdocs tool, I have had the opportunity to see a snapshot of various docs sites a few weeks apart as the industry is starting to pay a lot more attention to how to make documentation agent-friendly. I got a surprise...
My hypothesis this year around AI was that if I develop some agent skills to speed up repeatable processes, it might clear up my bandwidth and free up time for me to work on non-repeatable doc tasks. It appears to be working.
As AI encroaches on the craft of writing, writers can benefit from fresh practices to maintain ownership of the process. The post Extending notations for writing composition appeared first on Story Needle.
A heavy week on the docs side. Two things shipped that I had been chewing on for a while, and a couple of small skills came together. Some reading and writing on the side too. - 🧪 Built a docs-ja-translator skill and landed the Japanese tutorial pilot at work. The skill takes ...
I'm working on a new research report that starts by scoring a wide cross-section of documentation sites with afdocs. Consider it an industry-wide audit driven by specific research questions. This has given me an excuse to dig into different platforms, web hosts, documentation ...
In this issue, you'll configure a coding agent to use local models, but first, you'll discover why managers view overqualified candidates as a hiring risk. You're Too Good For This Role If you've applied for a role that you're overqualified for, there's a good chance you won'...
We’ve scheduled our next Managing and mastering documentation projects with AI course. It will be held on the mornings of 8th and 9th July 2026. The course helps documentation project managers and senior writers use AI for strategic advantages, so they can transform trad...
Which AI vendor is going to come out on top: Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI? At the moment, they’re all great at general tasks, and the gap between them keeps shrinking. So the real competition has moved somewhere less glamorous: into your calendar, your inbox, you...