Doubt it. People want to interact with other humans. Hotel doorman problem etc.
Devs really don't want to work with tech writers to document their code though
Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
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Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#22I spent half a day writing tests against MS SQL where tests would create a separate schema, do their business, then the schema dropped via "DROP SCHEMA ... CASCADE". In the end, thanks to Meat Intelligence on the web I found out there is no CASCADE for MS SQL. But only because blogs and documentation etc were written by people who kinda mostly checked what they wrote.
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#23[deleted]
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#24If the role is eliminated, then the responsibility of the verifying and managing the docs will fall on somebody else.
AI does not take responsibility
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#25Sure, manually written API docs are a thing of the past. But this has been true even before the era of LLMs. But I'm not that sure that this argument stands for all kinds of software. Depending on the abstraction between your source code and the things your users want to achieve, the expert view of a technical communicator might be necessary in order to come up with instructions (how-to) that meet the needs of the person seeking help instead of just summarizing the software code in natural language.
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#26The problem is that AI generated content always has the same structure and grammatical style, and you absolutely still need to guide it in order to make good content. Tech writers will become more productive, not obsolete.
But why not have the developer that wrote the code guide the AI to generate the content? They know the code best. Actually at this rate, developers won't be writing code anyways but they're still in a better position to guide the AI.
> They know the code best.
Two major issues occur unless they have experience.
1. The developer will often have what is called "Acquired knowledge". That is information that is relevant but isn't in any of the files and the developer assumes other developers know what they know.
2. Often is the case that there is more information required that doesn't sit inside the code and is not evident to get the program to work. Quickest way to find that is to get a newbie on a clean machine to follow only the instructions.
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#27I asked Claude to summarize a legacy codebase yesterday.
Some of it was accurate.
Some of it was not.
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#28No they're not. My response: https://passo.uno/letter-those-who-fired-tech-writers-ai/
Re: Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
#29lol, lmao, author clearly does not understand what a tech writer (or any writer) actually does and how they're important.