To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by theptip » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

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 did the quality go up?

Obviously, yes? Maybe not the median or even mean, but peak quality for sure. If you know where to look there are more high-quality takes available now than ever before. (And perhaps more meaningfully, peak quality within your niche subgenre is better than ever).

> When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?

Yes? The quality and variety of indie games is amazing these days.

> When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?

This is the case where I don’t see a win, and I think it bears further thought; I don’t have a clear explanation. But I note this is the one case where production is not actually democratized. So it kinda doesn’t fit with the digital goods we are discussing.

> basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles

Is this actually true? Substack enables more independent career bloggers than ever before. I would love to see the numbers on professional indie devs. I agree these are very competitive fields, and an individual’s chances of winning are slim, but I suspect there are more professional indie creators than ever before.

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

#222

Post by anal_reactor » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

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…

In every single discussion AI-sceptics claim "but AI cannot make a Michelin-star five-course gourmet culinary experience" while completely ignoring the fact that most people are perfectly happy with McDonald's, as evidenced by its tremendous economic and cultural success, and the loudest complaint with the latter is the price, not the quality.

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

#223

Post by kbelder » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #137

Nextgrid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that so many things have been monopolized or oligopolized by equally-mediocre actors so that quality ultimately no longer matters because it's not like people have any options. You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has…

"well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it." First, I understand what you're saying and generally agree with it, in the sense that that is how the organization will "experience" it. However, the answer to "will it lead to a noticeable drop in revenue" is actually yes . The problem is that it won't lead to a traceable drop i…

Just restating: Traceable errors get corrected, untraceable errors don't, and so over time the errors affecting you inevitably are comprised nearly entirely of accumulated untraceable issues.

It means you need judgement-based management to be able to over-ride metric-based decisions, at times.

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

#224

Post by glemion43 » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

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…

I let it generate README.md files for my projects and they look awesome and they read nice and are theoretically helpful for everyone new.

And LLM are really good in reading your docs to help someone. So I make sure to add more concrete examples into them

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

#225

Post by ponector » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:24 PM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #110

A somewhat related anecdote: Two years ago, I asked chatgpt to rewrite my resume. It looked fantastic at a first sight, then, one week later I re-read it, and feel ashamed to have sent it to some prospective employers. It was full of cringe inducing babble. You see, for an LLM there are no hierarchies other than what it observed in their training, and even then, applying it in a different context may be tricky for th…

To get through the hiring process nowadays you actually need an AI written CV because no one is reading it except of AI powered ATS used by HR department.

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

#226

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

wagwang wrote: post #206

adrian_b wrote: post #162

While I agree with the article, the reducing of the number of technical writers due to the belief that their absence can be compensated by AI is just the most recent step of a continuous process of degradation of the technical documentation that has characterized the last 3 decades. During the nineties of the last century I was still naive enough to believe that the great improvements in technology, i.e. the widespre…

The obvious explanation is that the pace of writing software has speed up 100x but documentation has remained slow... until now.

There are better tools for software developers now than in e.g. 1996, so the pace of writing software has indeed increased, but certainly there has not been any 100x speed up.

At best there may have been a doubling of the speed, though something like +50% is much more likely.

Between e.g. 1980 and 1995 the speed of writing documentation has increased much faster than the speed of writing programs has ever increased, due to the generalization of the use of word processors on personal computers, instead of using typewriting machines.

Many software projects might be completed today much faster than in the past only when they do not start from zero, but they are able to reuse various libraries or program components from past projects, so the part that is actually written now is very small. Using an AI coding assistant does exactly the same thing, except that it automates the search through past programs and it also circumvents the copyright barriers that would prevent the reuse of programs in many cases.

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

#227

Post by JadeNB » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

samiv wrote: post #156

fainpul wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I'm not trying to be snarky, but, if the principle is broadly applied, then what is the difference between these two? (I agree that, if it can only be applied to a limited population, making a few poor people wealthier might be better than making a few products cheaper.)

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

#228

Post by weirdmantis69 » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #115

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget. Exactly. If the AI-made documentation is only 50% of the quality but can be produced for 10% of the price, well, we all know what the "sma…

> If the AI-made documentation is only 50% of the quality AI-made documentation has 0% of the quality. As the OP pointed, AI can only document things that somebody already wrote down. That's no documentation at all.

AI can often synthesis information out of for example, code and screenshots and navigate a website. It could effectively document the current state of a given web application for example whereas most companies have 0 documentation whatsoever.

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

#229

Post by wagwang » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #226

wagwang wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious explanation is that the pace of writing software has speed up 100x but documentation has remained slow... until now.

There are better tools for software developers now than in e.g. 1996, so the pace of writing software has indeed increased, but certainly there has not been any 100x speed up. At best there may have been a doubling of the speed, though something like +50% is much more likely. Between e.g. 1980 and 1995 the speed of writing documentation has increased much faster than the speed of writing programs has ever increased,…

I'm talking about the features/hr. It's trivial now to spin up a website with login, search, commenting, notifications, etc. These used to be multi week projects.

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

#230

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

wagwang wrote: post #229

adrian_b wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better tools for software developers now than in e.g. 1996, so the pace of writing software has indeed increased, but certainly there has not been any 100x speed up. At best there may have been a doubling of the speed, though something like +50% is much more likely. Between e.g. 1980 and 1995 the speed of writing documentation has increased much faster than the speed of writing programs has ever increased,…

I'm talking about the features/hr. It's trivial now to spin up a website with login, search, commenting, notifications, etc. These used to be multi week projects.

Exactly my point.

This is not writing something new for scratch, but just using an already existing framework, with minor customization for the new project.

Writing an essentially new program, which does something never accomplished before, proceeds barely faster today than what could be done in 1990, with a programming environment like those of Microsoft or Borland C/C++.