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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

#201

Post by entontoent »

Was anyone else confused by this title?

I thought it was saying "a letter to those who fired tech writers because they were caught using AI," not "a letter to those who fired tech writers to replace them with AI."

The whole article felt imprecise with language. To be honest, it made me feel LESS confident in human writers, not more.

I was having flashbacks to all of the confusing docs I've encountered over the years, tightly controlled by teams of bad writers promoted from random positions within the company, or coming from outside but having a poor understanding of our tech or how to write well.

I'm writing this as someone who majored in English Lit and CS, taught writing to PhD candidates for several years, and maintains most of my own company's documentation.

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

#202

Post by LtWorf »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #126
LtWorf wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are good at writing long pages of meaningless words. If you have a number of pages to turn in with your writing assignment and you've only written 3 sentences they will help you produce a low quality result that will pass the requirements.

Low-quality is relative. LLMs' low-quality is most people's above-average. The fact the copy - either way - is likely to go through some sort of copy-by-committee process makes the case for LLMs even stronger (i.e., why waste your time). Not always, but quite often.

No it's not. It's low quality because it's extremely verbose and that wastes time.

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

#203

Post by threethirtytwo »

theletterf wrote: post #193
threethirtytwo wrote: post #178

Im not kidding when I say the tone feels AI generated. It’s obviously not AI generated but I’m more speaking to the tonality of the latest gpt. It’s now extremely hard to tell the difference.

Author here. I'm human. I wrote the full thing. :)

What’s the point of confirming? AI can lie and so can humans as well.

I believe you but that’s just a gut feeling. I guess the best way to put this is anyone can write what you wrote with AI and claim it wasn’t written by AI.

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

#204

Post by marcosdumay »

InMice wrote: post #189
marcosdumay wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it expected that LLMs will continue to improve over time? By whom? Your expectations aren't the same everybody has.

I dont have any expectations. Thats why I was asking

Well, expectations vary widely.

On one hand, recent models seem to be less useful than the previous generation of them, the scale needed for training improved networks seems to be following the expected quadratic curve, and we don't have more data to train larger models.

On the other hand, many people claim that what tooling integration is the bottleneck, and that the next generation of LLMs are much better than anything we have seen up to now.

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

#205

Post by dang »

nlawalker wrote: post #196

This was at #1 on the front page like an hour ago, and now after almost 100 new comments it’s off the front page at #40. What happened?

The answer could be: (1) users flagged it; (2) mods downweighted it; and/or (3) it set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector.

In this case it was #3.

That's one of the ways the system autocorrects. A sensational/indignant post attracts upvotes because that's how upvotes work (this is a weakness of the upvoting system), and this triggers an overheated discussion, which trips the flamewar detector which penalizes the post. It's about as simple a feedback mechanism as a thermostat.

That's why it's not uncommon for something to be at #1 and have tons of upvotes and comments, and then suddenly plummet. We do review all the threads that get that particular penalty but sometimes it takes a while.

Edit: ok, I've reviewed it. In this case, the thread is actually pretty good. I'm not sold on the article*, but a good thread is enough to turn off the flamewar penalty in this case, and I've done so.

(* not a judgment about article quality in general, only about how good a fit it is or isn't for HN)

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

#206

Post by wagwang »

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.

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

#207

Post by tmvnty »

I’m already seeing colleagues at work using AI to generate documentations and then call it a day. It’s like they are oblivious to how _ugly_ and _ineffective_ the AI generated AI slops are:

- too many emojis - too many verbose text - they lack the context of what’s important - critical business and historical context are lost - etc..

They used AI to satisfy the short-term gain: “we have documentation”, without fully realising the long-term consequences of low quality. As a result, imo we’ll see the down spiral effects of bugs, low adoption, and unhappy users.

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

#208

Post by drob518 »

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

Yes, product managers and product owners should also be looking for usability problems. That said, the docs people are often going through procedures step by step, double-checking things, and they will often hit something that the others missed.

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

#209

Post by jacobr1 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #32
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…

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…

Also consider that while the OP looks like a skilled, experienced individual, all too often the documentation is being written by someone with that context, but rather someone unskilled, and with read empathy. Quality is quite often very poor, to the point where as shitty as genai can be, it is still an improvement. Bad UX and writing outnumbers the good. The successes of big companies and the most well known government services are the exception.

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

#210

Post by theletterf »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #203
theletterf wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I'm human. I wrote the full thing. :)

What’s the point of confirming? AI can lie and so can humans as well. I believe you but that’s just a gut feeling. I guess the best way to put this is anyone can write what you wrote with AI and claim it wasn’t written by AI.

Prove it.
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