Recent posts from the tech docs community
50 recent posts
While chatting with Sarah Deaton about the formats agents could use to talk to each other, we got to questions that might sound obvious: why should machines (say, LLMs) communicate with each other like we do? Do they need all the rhetoric we carry around? Or could they get by ...
This is Part II of a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy transitions from describing the reasons for the gap between academics and practitioners (explained in Part I) to solutions. Some solutions inv...
This is a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy explains why there's such a gap between industry practitioners and academics. He lays out...
Before you ship a single blog post or community program, understand your company's market position. Part 1 of a series on building a developer advocacy strategy that actually drives business outcomes.
The blog that taught technical writing for five years has a new name, a new look, and a bigger mission. Here's the story of the rebrand, the rebuild, and what to expect next.
If you’ve worked in product development for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered the confusion around documentation. Take different companies and you’ll find the same documents used under different names. What one team calls a PRD, another might ca...
Technical writers are often judged on the quality of the finished documentation. It is what customers, support teams, auditors, and internal users see. However, a lot of documentation problems begin much earlier. They begin when the writer is handed a Jira ticket or a pull req...
My Obsidian vault has 291 notes captured over the last three years. Some are long-form notes, prompts for tools like Claude Code, or quick captures from reading on the internet. When I created this vault, I started with 8 folders, but over time the number has grown to 16. I li...
AI can make technical writers faster. It cannot remove the hard part of technical writing. The hard part is knowing what is true, what matters to the user, and what needs to be maintained after the product changes. For documentation teams, that distinction matters. AI can redu...
AI agents are starting to do real work. They can search systems, draft answers, update records, test software, summarise documents, create pull requests, and trigger other tools. In some organisations, they are already moving from experiment to everyday workflow. That causes a...
Problem: Multiple sets of parentheses enclosing numbers in the form ( x/x ). There are spaces after each opening parenthesis and before each closing parenthesis—I want to get rid of the spaces. Solution: A wildcard find/replace will sort this out, but I needed to take so...
Get the free AI cheatsheet for technical writers here: https://links.dianapayton.com/ai-cheatsheet It covers the AI tools, concepts, and people worth following that actually matter for tech writers right now — no fluff, no hype. If you're feeling the pressure to prove your A...
A product onboarding process is essential for SaaS and technical software products. It guides users from initial signup to full mastery of the product. In competitive industries like SaaS and technical documentation tools, onboarding directly affects activation rates and long-...
Several weeks ago, we introduced and began testing a dark theme option for our dashboard. This added an option for …
The June issue is only going to cover a single topic: setting up a local LLM to surface your own work. Load up your blog posts, tutorials, notes, and other works into a pipeline you control, without having to hand things over to for-profit models. Keep your content and your th...
Hello again, documentarians. Aaron here with the rest of the newsletter team to deliver insights from the community before taking a month off to refresh ourselves. In my case, it means finding somewhere to cool off for at least a little while.
The thing I'm most excited about with AI lately is SKILLs. (I have to capitalize the word at first so you know I'm talking about agent skills rather than just general capabilities; however, I'll subsequently just refer to agent skills as skills.) I've now built about 10 skills...
Last week, Anthropic launched Claude Tag for Slack. For documentation teams, it is worth paying attention to. At first glance, it looks like another AI assistant added to a workplace tool. You mention @Claude in a Slack channel, ask it to do something, and it replies in the th...
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. In the discussion, we talk about the complex character of Demis Hassabis (and comparisons to Ender's game), the idea o...
Cherryleaf’s 2026 survey of AI in technical communication reveals technical communicators are no longer asking whether AI has a place in documentation work. Most are already using it. In our 2026 survey, 62% of the respondents said they use AI regularly or daily in their...
AI tools make it easier than ever to generate content. With that ease, nearly anyone can become a contributor to the documentation. When people are using AI tools to create documentation, how do you maintain the quality, consistency, and accuracy of the content? Fabrizio Ferri...
Picture a documentation specialist staring at a 500-page API reference manual needing urgent revision before tomorrow’s release. This pressure alone tests endurance limits. Now imagine this specialist confronting a critical formatting nightmare without knowledge of regular exp...
Interested in refining your professional brand, interview prep, or other career coaching? Schedule a meeting to see if we're a good fit: https://calendly.com/dfhauer/30min Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ What happens when the person writi...
From Tribal Knowledge to Scalable Procedures is a practical webinar for growing, changing, or reorganising organisations that rely too heavily on “ask the expert” knowledge. We’ll explore how to capture the know-how held in people’s heads, turn it into clear and usable procedu...
In this episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast, Ellis Pratt talks with Ben French, leadership development consultant and business coach, about compassionate compliance: how leaders can use policies, procedures, and regulation to protect their people and meet legal obligations witho...
The Pup Puzzle was purchased as a way to file down the dogs’ claws. Test #1: Treats inserted into trays so dogs could see them. Dog 1 kept waiting for the humans to hand her treats. Dog 2 became startled … Continue reading → The post Dog Toy Test Report appeared fi...
Executive summary It’s never easy to measure the cost of a software support ticket, because it costs more than the time a support agent spends writing a reply. The cost also includes team leaders, training, ticketing software, telephony, office costs and the time spent o...
Over recent months, we’ve been using AI to conduct a monthly survey that tracks hiring demand for Technical Authors across the UK. This month, Stepstone counts have been deduplicated (only the larger Totaljobs figure is used) and cloud‑platforms that blocked access (such as In...
AI doesn't always save time, and even when it does, it can leave users exhausted. AI tools are poorly matched to the needs of knowledge workers. The post Why is using AI so exhausting? appeared first on Story Needle.
Your organisation has procedures. So why aren’t people following them? It’s rarely a discipline problem. In our experience, it’s almost always a documentation problem. In our free recorded webinar, we’ll walk through all five root causes, and show you e...
Google Docs has earned its spot as the world’s most popular word processor, with over a billion users worldwide. Its cloud-based simplicity is attractive for beginners and start-ups: draft a quick API guide, share, and collaborate live without software installs. Free tiers and...
Interested in refining your professional brand, interview prep, or other career coaching? Schedule a meeting to see if we're a good fit: https://calendly.com/dfhauer/30min Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ Learn how a career as a technical ...
I’ve gone to the dark side! I’ve now used AI to do the voiceovers in some instructional videos I’m making. These videos are for some software I’ve been using (not related to technical writing and editing) that has no documentation. The aim is to upload ...
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 ...
Docs as code used to mean editing docs as if they were code. Today it also means that docs have become executable, either as agentic instructions, skills, or context for large language models. Tech writers must now ensure that the reference and procedures they’ve carefully wri...
How I added an opt-in semantic search mode to my static Jekyll blog.
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 ...
Screen recording tools and AI services significantly streamline video tutorial production for technical documentation. They enable content creators to capture, edit, and distribute instructional content efficiently. Tools such as Snagit, OBS Studio, and AI-powered platforms li...
What Is ClickHelp? ClickHelp is a cloud-based documentation platform that helps product teams create, host, and publish technical documentation (from user manuals and API references to knowledge bases and customer-facing portals) without installing software. The editor works l...
Interested in refining your professional brand, interview prep, or other career coaching? Schedule a meeting to see if we're a good fit: https://calendly.com/dfhauer/30min Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ Information architecture isn't sit...
Documentation Teams Already Use AI, But the Workflow Is Still Broken Writers use Claude or ChatGPT to draft topics, rephrase sections, or generate outlines. The output is usually good – and then the same person copies it, opens the documentation portal, finds the right topic, ...
Picture a busy contact center at a major e-commerce platform during peak holiday season. Support agents handle thousands of customer queries daily: tracking orders, resolving shipping issues, managing returns. The bottleneck is not the agents themselves. It is the time lost hu...
AI-generated audio is fast becoming a primary channel for consuming content online. It's changing user behavior. The post Audio AI is hacking your brain appeared first on Story Needle.
In my predictions for 2030 I wrote that tech writers would be using specialized LLMs, running locally on powerful hardware. I see hints of this move to “local first” among engineering pundits, but we’re not there yet, in part because of how much more powerful connected frontie...
Instead of thinking just about user personas for your documentation, think about where people are in their awareness of your product and its features. In this issue, you'll explore the intersection of documentation and marketing to drive product growth in your docs. Then you'l...
In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about a variety of topics related to AI and docs, such as applying Italo Calvino's literary principles of lightness and quickness to evaluate docs, the reality of AI review fatigue versus creator fatigue, whether vibe-coded...
Back in February 2026, I wrote two posts about how I am tracking Codex CLI and Claude Code token usage. During that time, I used both CLI agent tools for work and personal projects. Both posts used a tool called ccusage and its variant (at that time), @ccusage/codex. ccusage i...
Interested in refining your professional brand, interview prep, or other career coaching? Schedule a meeting to see if we're a good fit: https://calendly.com/dfhauer/30min Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianapayton/ Learn how a career in technical wr...
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 ...