Recent posts from the tech docs community
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In this podcast, I chat with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about using skills to extend AI capabilities, the future of agentic engineering, local models like Qwen and Gemma, and whether the tech writer role is shifting into automation architecture. We get into the...
Mixed week. A small side-project release, a couple of satisfying wins on the work side, and a lot of late-night ideas I want to act on coming week. - 🚀 Shipped SkillsBar v1.7.0. The big addition is Codex plugin support and adding custom collections view where one can organize ...
While I’ve been retired from this page for a bit, it’s nice to know that the content is still finding its designated audience. With the reader’s permission, I’ve reposted our recent correspondence, with a bit of editing here and there. … Continue ...
Three years ago I published a high fantasy map of technical writing. The world has moved quite a bit since then. AI happened, and with it a darkness has crept in from the north, one that feeds on the daily pessimism of writers that feel cornered. I felt like an update was long...
The fear of losing a file is a big deal using Claude Code since it has access to bash tools and can run bash commands on its own. This is possible whenever --dangerously-skip-permissions is enabled or I have accepted edits inside a particular session. A workaround for this can...
What Is a PRD? A PRD (Product Requirements Document) is a foundational document that outlines what a product or feature needs to achieve. Product managers (PMs) write PRDs to describe requirements, objectives, and user needs, supporting communication between stakeholders, team...
Allegory of Commerce. 1801. Francisco Goya (1746–1828)By Robert Delwood, a Lead API Documentation WriterThinking like a developer to the rescue. Again.There is more to API documentation writing than just writing documentation. Many start out thinking like a technical writer. T...
With my work on the Agent-Friendly Documentation Spec and the companion AFDocs tool, I've been talking with a lot of people about what all this means. I've been writing about the different failure modes in a way that might make sense to a web developer, or a documentarian with...
You’ve been there. The product ships to three different audiences — admins, end users, enterprise clients. Each group needs different docs. So someone on the team does the logical thing: duplicates the project. Three times. Six months later, a developer fixes a critical ...
I recently gave a presentation to students and faculty in person at Louisiana Tech University on March 30, 2026, focusing on what I call the cyborg model of technical writing. The idea is that the emerging model for tech writing isn't one in which AI replaces tech writers but ...
Almost exactly a month ago, I wrote an article about poking around in my server logs attempting to measure agent web traffic: How to Measure Agent Web Traffic. I was trying to give our documentation platform team information to help them identify agents in our web traffic. My ...
This week leaned heavy into to upgrading lint tools at work and a bit of writing. I also managed to create a skill to perform a tedious activity with Claude Code and /chrome tool it has, which I am going to write about in a future post. - 📝 Wrote three short blog drafts that w...
Adding to my ‘I didn’t know I could do that in Word!’ list, is this quick tip for jumping to a position a certain percentage into the document. This is a great time saver for very long documents, especially those where there are no (or few) headings in the na...
Digital tools that create "something" out of "nothing" are not really doing that. There's always something being created from, but that doesn't mean the results are good.
Finding the right information at the right time is one of the most persistent challenges in any organization. Enterprise search solves this by giving employees a single interface to query multiple internal repositories — databases, documents, collaboration tools, and cloud pla...
The post What is Single Source of Truth (SSOT)? appeared first on Paligo.
The role of the technical writer is changing as AI tools are used more and more. Organisations need people who can use them, evaluate them critically, build workflows around them, and guide teams in using them responsibly. A career matrix is one of the most practical ways to d...
Ahoy there, documentarians! Spring is beginning to pop up in these parts, which means growth, flowers, and of course pollen. I hope you are all able to find some pleasure around you that isn’t covered in too much discomfort.
LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT can be costly and require you to trust others with your data. You can cut costs and keep your data private by running LLMs on your own computer, and integrate them directly into your apps and workflows. Before you build those workflows, you shoul...
Managing complex documents is a constant challenge for many organisations. A change in one manual can often affect several other policies. To solve this, Cherryleaf has developed a new proof of concept app that helps teams track these vital links. The challenge of document man...
The post The Anatomy of Harmful AI: What 1,400 Incidents Reveal appeared first on Paligo.
After sharing my article yesterday about the verification gap in AI content pipelines, someone on LinkedIn replied: "I'll take humble human mistakes over confident machine gibberish any day." It's a great line and I appreciate the sentiment, but there's an angle to i...
We are announcing the deprecation of the ubuntu-20.04 build image on Read the Docs. The removal date is set …
AI agents routinely skip content when reading documentation, grabbing just enough to generate an answer. The entities with the most technical leverage to fix this have the weakest financial incentive to try. The technical writers who care the most about the content are being s...
I've been running an AI-assisted editorial pipeline for about a month now. Seven stages. Two competing model drafts per topic. Automated fact-checking. Automated copy editing. Governed inputs from a curated news-gathering system. Twenty published articles on aeshift.com. Every...
Busy week with mix of publishing, drafting, and big changes. The kind where you look back and wonder how it all fit into five days. - 📝 Wrote a blog post based on the recent works on Expo docs. It talks about different layers of discoverability that have become essential for h...
Recently, Vercel published an Agent Readability Spec (Timothy Jordan, last updated March 23, no publication date), a scoring system for how well websites serve AI agents. It covers llms.txt, markdown mirrors, content negotiation, structured data, robots.txt, and a checklist of...
When someone says a doc site is "discoverable", they often mean that a human can find it through a search engine or use the in-site text-based search. Most documentation sites are built for human readers. If a page loads correctly and reads well, it is considered discoverable....
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 ...
I wrote the other day about the AI news gathering pipeline I set up that collects and tags news items for different downstream consumers. One of those downstream sources is my new blog, aeshift.com. I wanted the site to have an editorial voice and lens serving practitioners - ...
The blog went quiet for a while, where did the developer go?
What Is DocOps? DocOps is an integrated approach that brings documentation into the heart of the software development lifecycle. It mirrors how DevOps unites development and operations. It treats technical writing as code, enabling teams to create, review, update, and publish ...
The role of documentation teams is changing fast. Here’s what we think should be on every documentation manager’s strategic agenda. 1. Increase your visibility Visibility is about communicating status to stakeholders. It’s easier than ever to create dashboard...
When I decided I might be doing more than just digging into AI a little, I started to think about how I might want to learn about AI in a more realistic way. There were two facets to the problem: how do I find out about interesting AI-related developments, and how do I get mor...
A cloud data company recently made what it described as targeted staff cuts, eliminating its entire technical writing and documentation department. According to reports, the Product Managers will take on documentation responsibilities from now on. There may be perfectly sound ...
As a research tool You can retrieve code changes from a repository and use AI to look at the changes and summarise them as release notes or change note or make recommendations on what needs to be amended within the user documentation. Reviewing content You can get AI to simula...
The AI revolution is laying bare so many biases. LLM bad behavior and ChatGPT hallucinations revealing the chat room cruelties in its learning data. Research and lawsuits keep piling up around how AI job screening tools discriminate illegally, be it age, gender or ethnicity.
If someone asked me to set up a team in charge of software documentation, I would not hire for specific roles or cookie-cut job descriptions. Professions tied to knowledge buckets are bound to shrink or disappear. Instead, I would hire people that could move freely between fou...
The prompt is the line you stare at before every command in a terminal app. It can be as minimal as a symbol like $ or . By default, the Terminal app on macOS uses zsh with a plain prompt that shows your macOS username. While it shows some information, it tells you nothing abo...
Someone made a feature request on the skill-validator tool: support for the evals/ directory introduced by Anthropic's recent updates to its skill-creator skill. This is the third or fourth Claude Code-specific request I've gotten regarding skill-validator development, and the...
In this podcast, I chat with two professors — Nupoor Ranade (Carnegie Mellon) and Jeremy Merritt (James Madison University) — about how AI is reshaping the technical writing profession from the academic side. We discuss dropping enrollments, misconceptions about wh...
The Agent Skills spec claims to be "A simple, open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise." But the creator of Agent Skills, Anthropic, is also the company behind the spec's maintenance. And when a platform both owns a spec and competes with the plat...
If you’re a technical writer creating changelogs or release notes, AI can save you a huge amount of time. Traditionally, this work involves digging through repositories, reviewing code changes, checking JIRA tickets, and speaking with subject matter experts, just to unde...
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 March 2026. Overall job volume The data suggest that overall demand for permanent and long-term technical documentation s...
Code-to-docs is the practice of turning source code into structured, human-readable documentation automatically or semi-automatically. Rather than writing every word by hand, teams use a code documentation generator, or a combination of generators and AI-powered tools, to prod...
Someone recently asked on LinkedIn: “Can anyone point to resources on quality/heartbeat dashboards for technical documentation? BKMs or case studies?” It’s a really important question. There are dashboards throughout organisations, but not always in the Techn...
Writing changelogs is one of those tasks in technical writing that’s important but nobody enjoys. So we automated it. This app connects to a private GitHub repository, lets you set a date range, and generates a polished, user-facing changelog from your recent commits. No...
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Will Kill Us All by Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, held March 15, 2026. Our discussion touches on a variety of topics, including whether the book's use of parables s...
You shipped your llms.txt. You linked to your docs pages. Maybe you even set up progressive disclosure with per-product files. You're done, right? Probably not. An llms.txt that was accurate when you launched it can silently drift out of sync with your actual documentation. Ne...
I usually have two or more sessions running at a time either in the same or different project directories. One of the longest and most used sessions I have is in my notes directory, where I am constantly creating specs or taking notes on the stuff I am working on. One problem ...