Recent posts from the tech docs community
50 recent posts
AI can draft a troubleshooting topic, rewrite a paragraph, or summarise a product specification in seconds. But that is just part of technical writing. A Technical Author’s working day, in reality, includes research, planning, interviewing subject matter experts, checking fact...
These days I am spending more time in the terminal app than any other environment on my development machine. Most of it comes down to using agentic harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and more. Previously, for the last two months, I have been using Otty terminal app and ...
When AI is involved in content development, readers don't know who the real author is. It's time to offer traceability through version histories. The post Show me the work: Overcoming AI’s impostor syndrome appeared first on Story Needle.
Six Months Later
Two dictionaries independently picked the same word of the year for 2025: slop. Merriam-Webster defines it as digital content of low quality, produced in quantity by artificial intelligence. Macquarie went with “AI slop” and added a detail I keep thinking about: co...
Our August 2026 survey suggests that the UK employment market for Technical Writers and Technical Authors remains broadly stable, although slightly softer than it was in June. We estimate there are currently around 4,300-4,500 Technical Writer, Technical Author, and closely re...
A lot of policy and onboarding training still follows a familiar format: a presenter, some PowerPoint slides, and generic stock footage. That format is straightforward to produce, but it can make important information harder for staff to follow. AI-assisted production gives le...
A few weeks ago I ran isagentready.com on docs.expo.dev, a site that I manage and work on, for my day job. One of the failed references during the check was the lack of Content-Signal policy in robots.txt file of the site. Just for context, isagentsready.com is a tool that che...
Eric Holscher here, co-founder of Write the Docs.
We recently read The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut in my AI Book Club. This was our first work of fiction, though much of the text is imagined biography, so not really traditional fiction. It reads more like a collection of short biographical facets, connected thematically but l...
One question keeps coming from customers running multilingual docs through machine translation: why does the same term come back different across languages, or even across their own topics? To understand where terminology drift comes from and how teams can prevent it, we...
The evidence gap: a free worksheet for technical writers https://links.dianapayton.com/evidence-gap-worksheet You led the migration. You built the pipeline. You trained the product managers. And none of it is visible to anyone outside your employer. That gap is the single big...
I’m seeing more instances of docs and README files addressing agents directly, as in “Hey, if you’re an agent, follow these instructions”. In some cases, those instructions are visible to human readers as well, which makes for a deeply awkward experience, the reading equivalen...
Last time when I started to write this post, I got carried away. My brain was on verge of explosion because Claude and I had worked together on so many projects and stuff over the last six months. My first interaction with the harness was in February 2026 when I started adopti...
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neum...
Knowledge management in B2B customer support is challenging in its own way. B2B teams handle complex products with multi-system integrations, require lengthy onboarding for agents to master technical details, and face situations where clients simply don’t tolerate slow or inco...
People willingly spend hours watching YouTube, yet groan when asked to watch an eight-minute training video. Why is that? At Cherryleaf, we develop videos for our e-learning courses on technical communication and publish our own marketing videos on YouTube. But we are not, by ...
Last week, I wrote the words “reader as actor” about 200 times in PR reviews. I updated a few skills and reworked lots of sentences around this theme. Making sure the reader is the actor in the docs is my newest obsession, the latest sentence-level nit I’ve started noticing ev...
Docs-as-code is a practical way to treat documentation the same way teams treat software: it lives in Git, changes go through pull requests, versions can be tracked, and publishing can be automated on every push. It gives technical writing the same discipline that engineering ...
There is a tempting way to create e-learning from a policy or procedure: Split the document into sections. Put each section on a slide. Add narration. Finish with a multiple-choice quiz. It is also a good way to produce very dull, and ineffective, training. Policies and proced...
AI can help technical writers draft, summarise, review, and restructure content. But there’s a bigger opportunity. What if you could use AI to help manage the documentation project itself? Our next Managing and mastering documentation projects with AI course takes place online...
This week I attended Ai4, promoted as the largest AI conference in North America. It was held at The Venetian in Las Vegas and lasted 3 days. The conference had more than 12,000 attendees (from 100 countries), 400 exhibitors/sponsors, 1,000 speakers, 700 sessions, keynotes fro...
I am using Claude Code since February 2026 and recently I have completely stopped using "plan mode" in Claude Code most of the time and using "auto mode" most of the time during my workday. Is plan mode necessary?
Technical writing is not "the job where you make the PDFs." Here's what it actually is, and why the definition matters more now than it did 5 years ago. What I cover: - A working definition of technical writing that holds up under pressure - Why nobody reads documentation fo...
Neither people nor bots are reading web pages. What comes next? The post The demise of websites and CMSs appeared first on Story Needle.
A Canadian edibuddy (editing buddy) of mine recently posted an excellent ‘how to’ for identifying URLs that have come from ChatGPT or other sources, and then deleting them: https://eiw365.com/how-to-find-chatgpt-links-delete-them-from-a-word-file/ Thanks Adrienne! ...
“We’ve long thought of documentation as something to be repaired. The testing process quietly assumes something else, which is that documentation is something to be executed.” I find that quote from Stephen Mallette significant because it highlights an important distinction. A...
If you work with technical documentation, this situation is familiar: the same warning, installation note, or legal disclaimer appears across dozens of topics. When something changes (a product requirement, a version constraint, or a legal statement) every copy has to be updat...
In 2026, I set a goal to read 26 books. I had the lowest expectations of myself, and I stayed true to those expectations, because in January I did not read anything. I started reading in February, which is why I decided to write a six-month review of my 2026 books at the end o...
I’ve spent much of my time on this blog explaining how to write content: organizing it, shaping it, researching it, imbuing it with just the right facts or tone. But after a discussion with ChatGPT, it occurred to me that … Continue reading → The post Context...
The evidence gap: a free worksheet for technical writers https://links.dianapayton.com/evidence-gap-worksheet You led the migration. You built the pipeline. You trained the product managers. And none of it is visible to anyone outside your employer. That gap is the single big...
A feature can be ready for release and still be impossible to document properly. Let me explain. The technical writer might receive a completed development ticket, a few screenshots, and a message saying, “It works just like the previous version.” What is missing from that is ...
In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Sarah Deaton, a technical writer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code docs, about what documentation work looks like when much of it is automated. We discuss orchestrating docs through skills and agents rat...
Two companies can share the same market position and growth stage, yet need completely different DevRel strategies because they make money in different ways. Learn how to identify your company's monetization strategy and what it means for your work.
The experience you've built over your career is what helps you make decisions and identify trouble quickly. But experience has a cost. In this issue, you'll explore how you might undermine your expertise, and what you can do to be more effective when offering it to others. You...
AI coding assistants can write complex code, explain architecture, and catch bugs. However, without MCP servers, they cannot do anything in the real world. An AI agent cannot read your files, query your database, or create a ticket in your issue tracker. MCP servers turn a cha...
Early-stage startups and mature companies need completely different DevRel work. Learn how to match your priorities to your company's growth stage.
A friend of mine recently lost her job in a layoff. She looked at her résumé with a pang of despair and asked me for advice on what she should learn next. She hasn’t thrown in the towel on technical writing yet; she wants to find another tech writing job, despite the prevailin...
Text documentation is still the backbone of technical communication: it explains what to do, defines concepts, and structures logic. But multimedia documentation, especially video in technical documentation, screencasts for documentation, and automated process capture, answers...
New developer advocates rush to ship content before understanding the business. Learn why your company's market position should shape your strategy first.
An AI documentation scoping agent can help a content team decide whether a software change needs documentation, what work is likely, and whether a writer has enough reliable information to begin. Evidence first, generation second If a pull request changes a parameter, does the...
You can't do everything as a developer advocate. Learn the three areas of strategic analysis that narrow every possible DevRel initiative down to the ones most likely to create meaningful business value.
The evidence gap: a free worksheet for technical writers https://links.dianapayton.com/evidence-gap-worksheet You led the migration. You built the pipeline. You trained the product managers. And none of it is visible to anyone outside your employer. That gap is the single big...
AI agents are evolving into essential tools used in everyday work, but they still have a hard limit: without access to your real data and systems, they can only guess about the content and context. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard from Anthropic that solves thi...
Every guide to atomic notes eventually meets the same objection: most of what I write cannot be atomic. A meeting note is a list of actions and a transcript of a specific day. It's an event. A project plan is a spec file that contains decisions and at times, serialized tasks, ...
So we were chewing on our new Reader UI the other day: how many portals are on it, what to do about the ones still running the old version. Normal, slightly circular product talk. Somewhere in the middle of that I got curious about a side question and, because I am me, immedia...
I'm trying to build out a course on agent skills. For a while I've been looking for something more substantial and stable to sink my teeth into (similar to what I did with API documentation), and I think agent skills just might be it.
A developer portal and a learning site do different jobs. Documentation helps someone complete a task or find a precise answer. A learning site takes them from their current level of knowledge to a defined capability. Many organisations put both types of content into the same ...
The evidence gap: a free worksheet for technical writers https://links.dianapayton.com/evidence-gap-worksheet You led the migration. You built the pipeline. You trained the product managers. And none of it is visible to anyone outside your employer. That gap is the single big...
In large organizations, documentation tends to grow faster than anyone plans for. Content gets copied between products, teams maintain their own versions of the same feature description, and no one is entirely sure which page is “the source of truth.” This duplicat...