Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

passo.uno

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 278 posts

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

#151

Post by order-matters »

nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

your ability to articulate yourself cleanly comes across in this post in a way that I feel AI is trying to be and never quite reaches as well.

I completely agree that the ambitions of AI proponents to replace workers is insulting. You hit the nail on the head with pointing out that we simply dont write everything down. And the more common sense / well known something is the less likely it is to be written down, yet the more likely it might be needed by an AI to align itself properly.

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

#152

Post by esafak »

nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

Are you working in the legal field or is that separate? How big is your company?

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

#153

Post by Nextgrid »

theptip wrote: post #121
nicbou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource. It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment. I don't work for the public transit company; I introduce immigrants to Berlin's public transit. To answer to the broader question, good documentation is one of the many little things that affect how you feel about a company. The BVG clearly cares about that, because their mar…

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 was the last time that speed of development was the limiting factor? 15-20 years ago?

Nowadays the problem is that both technical and legal means are used to prevent adversarial interoperability. It doesn't matter if you (or AI) can write software faster if said software is unable to interface with the thing everyone else uses.

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

#154

Post by LtWorf »

InMice wrote: post #22

Is it expected that LLMs will continue to improve over time? All the recent articles like this one just seem to describe this technology's faults as fixed and permanent. Basically saying "turn around and go no further". Honestly asking because their arguments seem to be dependent on improvement never happening and never overcoming any faults. It feels shortsighted.

The LLM can't actually use the product and realise that the description is wrong.

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

#155

Post by psychoslave »

block_dagger wrote: post #57
nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

…says every charlatan who wanted to keep their position. I’m not saying you’re a charlatan but you are likely overestimating your own contributions at work. Your comment about feeding on data - AI can read faster than you can by orders of magnitude. You cannot compete.

>you are likely overestimating your own contributions at work

That’s the logical fallacy anyone is going to be pushed to as soon as judging their individual worth in an intrinsically collective endeavor will happen.

People in lowest incomes which would not be able to integrate in society without direct social funds will be seen as parasites by some which are wealthier, just like ultra rich will be considered parasites by less wealthy people.

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

#156

Post by samiv »

fainpul wrote: post #139
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 … did the quality go up? No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism). Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.

Well yeah more people can afford shitty things that end up in the landfill two weeks later. To me this is the essence of "consumerism".

Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap.

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

#157

Post by mixedbit »

GuB-42 wrote: post #102
nicbou wrote: post #26

I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers' problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being. I revise my local public transit guide every time I expe…

And that's exactly the same for coding! Coding is like writing documentation for the computer to read. It is common to say that you should write documentation any idiot can understand, and compared to people, computers really are idiots that do exactly as you say with a complete lack of common sense. Computers understand nothing, so all the understanding has to come from the programmer, which is his actual job. Just…

I like to think of coding as gathering knowledge about some problem domain. All that a team learns about the problem becomes encoded in the changes to the program source. Program is only manifestation of the humans minds. Now, if programmers are largely replaced with LLMs, the team is no longer gathering the knowledge, there is no intelligent entity whose understanding of the problem increases with time, who can help drive future changes, make good business decisions.

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

#158

Post by burroisolator »

"Productivity gains are real when you understand that augmentation is better than replacing humans..." Isn't this where the job losses happen? For example, previously you needed 5 tech writers but now you only need 4 to do the same work. Hopefully it just means that the 5th person finds more work to do, but it isn't clear to me that Jevons paradox kicks in for all cases.

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

#159

Post by asah »

GuB-42 wrote: post #150

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…

not true! it's read by other LLMs! /s

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

#160

Post by Barathkanna »

I agree with the core concern, but I think the right model is smaller, not zero. One or two strong technical writers using AI as a leverage tool can easily outperform a large writing team or pure AI output. The value is still in judgment, context, and asking the right questions. AI just accelerates the mechanics.
Post reply on HN