The Soul of the Technical Writer

This past weekend I finally pulled a special edition of Time magazine off my bookshelf. It is called "Artificial Intelligence: The Promise and The Perils." It has been sitting there for a while but I finally had the time to really dig into it. It covers a lot of ground from the basics of what AI is to the big questions about how it might impact humanity in both positive and negative ways.

One specific article jumped out at me because it hit on an epiphany I had last year. I am not going to retire as a technical writer.

I know that sounds like a big statement. I came to this conclusion after watching how AI is changing our industry. While it has definitely made our workflows more efficient there is a flip side we cannot ignore. We have seen shifts in the industry where some assume technical writers are not as necessary once you have an LLM.

Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, a technical writer and documentation engineer I follow closely, recently wrote about this trend and called out the rise of "documentation theatre." This is the act of using AI tools to regurgitate code into a wiki just to check a box. He argues that when you ship these manuals without human oversight you are just creating noise. You cannot augment what is not there. If you remove the people who curate high quality context then the system falls apart. It is a perspective that really makes you think about where the human fits in the loop.

More Than Writing

Instead of falling into a negative spiral I have been trying to stay positive. I feel like a technical writer is needed now more than ever. Writing is actually just a small part of the job. We are also software testers and interviewers. We pull knowledge out of people's brains and translate it into something easy for others to understand. We are project managers.

So when I say I won't retire as a technical writer I don't mean I am leaving the field. I mean the role itself is evolving into something more strategic.

In my 2025 review I talked about how my workflow has changed. I am working with AI as a collaborator now. I am not always the one drafting the content from scratch. Instead it is about the architectural work I do to make the documentation happen. I am writing prompts and refining them until they produce results that actually make sense. I have the product knowledge to know what to ask in the first place and I know how to fill the gaps when the AI gives me something unexpected.

The Orchestrator Identity

I have had a bit of an identity crisis lately though maybe crisis is too strong of a word. I am curious if I am still a technical writer or if I am the orchestrator of a system of agents.

As I build out these systems to gather information and share it I still think the soul of a technical writer is at the center of it all. You still need that curiosity to learn how something works. You still have to tinker with the product and take note of what worked and what did not. All of that is done to produce high quality knowledge that helps someone else succeed.

Superpowered Tools

There was an interview in that magazine with Demis Hassabis the CEO of Google DeepMind. He said something that lined up perfectly with what has been swirling in my brain. He mentioned that they are building agent systems because they will be more useful and that will likely impact jobs. But he also thinks it will enable new kinds of roles that do not exist yet.

He described a future where you might be managing a set of agents that do the mundane research while you still curate the final article. He thinks we are heading into a phase where humans are superpowered by these tools assuming we know how to use them. He sees it as a net positive where the repetitive work goes away and the roles become more fulfilling and impactful.

The Human Element

That gives me a lot of hope. Maybe as a technical writer I can focus more on the high value stuff. For me that is the hands-on experience. The best part of this job is getting to play with a new feature and really understanding how it works from a human perspective.

You can look at a specification doc all day but it is different when you actually use the product. You start forming those empathetic paths. You start thinking about how a human feels while using it. This is exactly what Fabrizio means when he says an LLM lacks empathy because it cannot care. That is something AI cannot really do right now because it is math at the end of the day. It is not human.

Today my title is Technical Writer. I think in my heart I will always be one even if the label on my LinkedIn changes over time. The foundation is the same but I am excited to see what kind of systems I can build next. It is cool to see that even AI leaders are talking about a future where these tools do not take away our roles but instead change them for the better.