Live data from Hacker News

To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

passo.uno

11–20 of 278 posts

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#11

But you might not need 5 tech writers anymore. Just 1 who controls an LLM.

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

Yes and no.

Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less.

It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while.

If both leave then you're screwed.

If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#12

But you might not need 5 tech writers anymore. Just 1 who controls an LLM.

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

Yes. That could be said for engineers as well.

If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1.

I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies.

IE:

2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers

2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers

The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#13

But you might not need 5 tech writers anymore. Just 1 who controls an LLM.

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

That assumes your backlog is finite.

Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

Yes and no. Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less. It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while. If both leave then you're screwed. If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.

This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3.

Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more.

This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#16
post #6

I don't think I've ever seen documentation from tech writers that was worth reading: if a tech writer can read code and understand it, why are they making half or less of what they would as an engineer? The post complains about AI making things up in subtle ways, but I've seen exactly the same thing happen with tech writers hired to document code: they documented what they thought should happen instead of what actual…

You sound unlucky in your tech writer encounters!

There are plenty of people who can read code who don't work as devs. You could ask the same about testers, ops, sysadmins, technical support, some of the more technical product managers etc. These roles all have value, and there are people who enjoy them.

Worth noting that the blog post isn't just about documenting code. There's a LOT more to tech writing than just that niche. I still remember the guy whose job was writing user manuals for large ship controls, as a particularly interesting example of where the profession can take you.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?

That assumes your backlog is finite. Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?

Yes. Yes it is.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#18
post #6

I don't think I've ever seen documentation from tech writers that was worth reading: if a tech writer can read code and understand it, why are they making half or less of what they would as an engineer? The post complains about AI making things up in subtle ways, but I've seen exactly the same thing happen with tech writers hired to document code: they documented what they thought should happen instead of what actual…

Not everyone wants to write code.

Yeah, but almost everyone wants money. You can see this by looking at what projects have the best documentation: they're all things like the man-pages project where the contributors aren't doing it as a job when they could be working a more profitable profession instead.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#19
Meh. A bit too touchy feely for my taste, and not much in ways of good arguments. Some of the things touched on in the article are either extreme romanticisations of the craft or rather naive takes (docs are product truth? Really?!?! That hasn't been the case in ages, with docs for multi-billion dollar solutions, written by highly paid grass fed you won't believe they're not humans!)...

The parts about hallucinations and processes are also a bit dated. We're either at, or very close to the point where "agentic" stuff works in a "GAN" kind of way to "produce docs" -> read docs and try to reproduce -> resolve conflicts -> loop back, that will "solve" both hallucinations and processes, at least at the quality of human-written docs. My bet is actually better in some places. Bitter lesson and all that. (at least for 80% of projects, where current human written docs are horrendous. ymmv. artisan projects not included)

What I do agree with is that you'll still want someone to hold accountable. But that's just normal business. This has been the case for integrators / 3rd party providers since forever. Every project requiring 3rd party people still had internal folks that were held accountable when things didn't work out. But, you probably won't need 10 people writing docs. You can hold accountable the few that remain.

Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

#20
And here I am, 2026, and one of my purposes for this year is to learn to write better, communicate more fluently, and convey my ideas in a more attractive way.

I do not think that these skills are so easily replaced; certainly the machine can do a lot, but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life.

In my humble opinion we will be losing that from people, the upscaling of skills will be lost for sure, but the human upscaling is the real loss.

Post reply on HN