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

passo.uno

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

#141

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #114
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #51

Good points. I suspect a lot of folks are asking ChatGPT to summarize it… I can’t imagine just letting an LLM write an app, server, or documentation package, wholesale and unsupervised, but have found them to be extremely helpful in editing and writing portions of a whole. The one thing that could be a light in the darkness, is that publishers have already fired all their editors (nothing to do with AI), and the writ…

as a writer, i have found AI editing tools to be woefully unhelpful. they tend to focus on specific usage guidelines (think Strunk & White) and have little to offer for other, far more important aspects of writing. i wrote a 5 page essay in November. the AI editor had sixty-something recommendations, and i accepted exactly one of them. it was a suggestion to hyphenate the adjectival phrase "25-year-old". i doubt that…

Thanks!

That makes a lot of sense, but right now, the editing seems to be completely absent, and, I suspect, most writers aren’t at your level (I am sure that I’m not).

It may be better than nothing.

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

#142

Post by Telemakhos »

samiv wrote: post #129
theptip wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint - I think it’s going to become much easier for hobbyists and motivated small companies to make bigger projects. I expect to see more OSS, more competition, and eventually better quality-per-price (probably even better absolute quality at the “$0 / sell your data” tier). Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more…

When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…

When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.

When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living.

The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity.

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

#143

Post by eszed »

throwaw12 wrote: post #72
drob518 wrote: post #23

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.

> 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

I take your point, but a good PM will have been inside the decision-making process and carry embedded assumptions about how things should work, so they'll miss things. An outside eye - whether it's QA, user-testing, (as here) the technical writer, or even asking someone from a different team to take an informal look - is an essential part of designing anything to be used by humans.

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

#144

Post by FrustratedMonky »

samiv wrote: post #129
theptip wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint - I think it’s going to become much easier for hobbyists and motivated small companies to make bigger projects. I expect to see more OSS, more competition, and eventually better quality-per-price (probably even better absolute quality at the “$0 / sell your data” tier). Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more…

When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…

I think for 'technical' writing, there is going to be some end-state crash.

What happens when all the engineers left can't figure out something, and they start opening up manuals, and they are also all wrong and trash. And the whole world grinds to a halt because nobody knows anything.

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

#145

Post by squeefers »

aurareturn wrote: post #131
oldjim798 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is what capital has told us. Capital always wants to reduce the labour cost to $0.

If labor cost is close to $0, even more businesses that weren’t viable before would become viable. Do you not see the logic?

ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction

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

#146

Post by loudmax »

drob518 wrote: post #23

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.

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

#147

Post by bookofjoe »

fainpul wrote: post #125
publicdebates wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word for word, 53 minutes later? Why? I have exactly 1 guess but am waiting to say it.

His other comment in this thread is also a clone of someone else's comment.

His or its?

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

#148

Post by samiv »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #136
samiv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…

>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up? ...yes? It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to rea…

I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc)

In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money.

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

#149

Post by Draiken »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #136
samiv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…

>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up? ...yes? It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to rea…

> but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier

I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before?

If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point.

If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not?

As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers.

Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software.

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

#150

Post by GuB-42 »

AI works well for one kind of documentation.

The kind of documentation no one reads, that is just here to please some manager, or meet some compliance requirement. These are, unfortunately, the most common kind I see, by volume. Usually, they are named something like QQF-FFT-44388-IssueD.doc and they are completely outdated with regard to the thing they document despite having seen several revisions, as evidenced by the inconsistent style.

Common features are:

- A glossary that describe terms that don't need describing, such as CPU or RAM, but not ambiguous and domain-specific terms, of which there are many

- References to documents you don't have access to

- UML diagrams, not matching the code of course

- Signatures by people who left the project long ago and are nowhere to be seen

- A bunch of screenshots, all with different UIs taken at different stages of development, would be of great value to archeologists

- Wildly inconsistent formatting, some people realize that Word has styles and can generate a table of contents, others don't, and few care

Of course, no one reads them, besides maybe a depressive QA manager.

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