The best tech writers I have worked with don’t merely document the product. They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems. They are invaluable. The best also know how to start with almost no engineering docs and to extract what they need from 1-1 sit down interviews with engineering SMEs. I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.

AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers.

But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre, technical documentation based on a halfheartedly updated wiki and the README files and comments scattered in the developers' code base. A lot of projects don't just have poor technical documentation, they have no technical documentation.

In my experience, great tech writers quietly function as a kind of usability radar. They're often the first people to notice that a workflow is confusing

> They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems.

I think everyone on the team should get involved in this kind of feedback because raw first impressions on new content (which you can only experience once, and will be somewhat similar to impatient new users) is super valuable.

I remember as a dev flagging some tech marketing copy aimed at non-devs as confusing and being told by a manager not to give any more feedback like that because I wasn't in marketing... If your own team that's familiar with your product is a little confused, you can probably x10 that confusion for outside users, and multiply that again if a dev is confused by tech content aimed at non-devs.

I find it really common as well that you get non-tech people writing about tech topics for marketing and landing pages, and because they only have a surface level understanding of the the tech the text becomes really vague with little meaning.

And you'll get lots devs and other people on the team agreeing in secret the e.g. the product homepage content isn't great but are scared to say anything because they feel they have to stay inside their bubble and there isn't a culture of sharing feedback like that.

> They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems

True, but it raises another question, what were your Product Managers doing in the first place if tech writer is finding out about usability problems

True.

Also true that most tech writers are bad. And companies aren't going to spend >$200k/year on a tech writer until they hit tens of millions in revenue. So AI fills the gap.

As a horror story, our docs team didn't understand that having correct installation links should be one of their top priorities. Obviously if a potential customer can't install product, they'd assume it's bs and try to find an alternative. It's so much more important than e.g. grammar in a middle of some guide.

> I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.

I think I agree, at least in the current state of AI, but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing. I did have some limited success with getting Claude Code to go through tutorials (actually implementing each step as they go), and then having it iterate on the tutorial, but it's definitely not at the level of a human tech writer.

Would you be willing to take a stab at the competencies that a future AI agent would require to be excellent at this (or possibly never achieve)? I mean, TFA talks about "empathy" and emotions and feeling the pain, but I can't help feel that this wording is a bit too magical to be useful.