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nicbou
Nextgrid
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 an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget.
Apply the same for software (have you seen how bad tech is lately?) or basically any kind of vertical with a nontrivial barrier to entry where someone can't just say "this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend".
nicbou
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 marketing department is famously competent. Good documentation also means that fewer people will queue at their service centre and waste an employee's time. Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service.
Besides, how people feels about the public transit company does matter, because their funding is partly a political question. No one will come to defend a much-hated, customer-hostile service.
theptip
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 of the benefits of the big platforms trickle down, why wouldn’t that continue?
Nicbou, do you see AI as increasing your personal output? If it lets enthusiastic individuals get more leverage on good causes then I still have hope.
tempodox
> Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service.
Thank you so much for saying this. Trying to convince anyone of the importance of documentation feels like an uphill battle. Glad to see that I'm not completely crazy.
rkomorn
> We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource.
I'd argue that this started 30 years ago when automated phone trees started replacing the first line of workers and making users figure out how to navigate where they needed to in order to get the service they needed.
I can't remember if chat bots or "knowledge bases" came first, but that was the next step in the "figure it out yourself" attitude corporations adopted (under the guise of empowering users to "self help").
Then we started letting corporations use the "we're just too big to actually have humans deal with things" excuse (eg online moderation, or paid services with basically no support).
And all these companies look at each other to see who can lower the bar next and jump on the bandwagon.
It's one of my "favorite" rants, I guess.
The way I see this next era going is that it's basically going to become exclusively the users' responsibility to figure out how to talk to the bots to solve any issue they have.
apercu
“It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment.”
Thank you. I love it when someone poetically captures a feeling I’ve been having so succinctly.
FeteCommuniste
> 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 "smart" business move is.
marcosdumay
> 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.
jerf
"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 in revenue. You may see the numbers go down. But the numbers don't come with labels why. You may go out and ask users why they are using your service less, but people are generally very terrible at explaining why they do anything, and few of them will be able to tell you "your documentation is just terrible and everything confuses me". They'll tell you a variety of cognitively available stories, like the place is dirty or crowded or loud or the vending machines are always broken, but they're terrible at identifying the real root causes.
This sort of thing is why not only is everything enshittifying, but even as the entire world enshittifies, everybody's metrics are going up up up. It takes leadership willing to go against the numbers a bit to say, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we provide quality documentation, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we use screws that don't rust after six months, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we don't take the cheapest bidder every single time for every single thing in our product but put a bit of extra money in the right place. Otherwise you just get enshittification-by-numbers until you eventually go under and get outcompeted and can't figure out why because all your numbers just kept going up.
kbelder
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.
jacobr1
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.
psychoslave
>it's not like people have any options.
That’s one way to frame it. An other one is, sometime people are stuck in a situation where all options that come to their mind have repulsive consequences.
As always some consequences are deemed more immediate, and other will seem remoter. And often the incentives can be quite at odd between expectations in the short/long terms.
>this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend
Hey, this is me looking at the world this morning. Bear with me, the bright new harmonious world should be there on Monday. ;)
GuB-42
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 because LLMs can produce grammatically correct sentences doesn't mean they can write proper documentation. In the same way, just because they are able to produce code that compiles doesn't mean they can write the program the user needs.
mixedbit
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.
boilerupnc
Well said. I try to capture and express this same sentiment to others through the following expression:
“Technology needs soul”
I suppose this can be generalized to “__ needs soul”. Eg. Technical writing needs soul, User interfaces need soul, etc. We are seriously discounting the value we receive from embedding a level of humanity into the things we choose (or are forced) to experience.
order-matters
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.
ChrisMarshallNY
Thanks so much for this!
Nicely written (which, I guess, is sort of the point).
ajuc
Replacement will be 80% worse, that's fine. As long as it's 90% cheaper.
See Duolingo :)
gausswho
I like the cut o' your jib. The local public transit guide you write, is that for work or for your own knowledge base? I'm curious how you're organizing this while keeping the human touch.
I'm exploring ways to organize my Obsidian vault such that it can be shared with friends, but not the whole Internet (and its bots). I'm extracting value out the curation I've done, but I'd like to share with others.
anal_reactor
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.
GuB-42
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 the inconsistent style.
Common features are:
- A glossary that describe terms that don't need describing, such as CPU or RAM, but not ambiguous and domain-specific terms, of which there are many
- References to documents you don't have access to
- UML diagrams, not matching the code of course
- Signatures by people who left the project long ago and are nowhere to be seen
- A bunch of screenshots, all with different UIs taken at different stages of development, would be of great value to archeologists
- Wildly inconsistent formatting, some people realize that Word has styles and can generate a table of contents, others don't, and few care
Of course, no one reads them, besides maybe a depressive QA manager.
glemion43
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
NewsaHackO
Also, one pet peeve of mine is when there are emojis in semi-serious writing. ChatGPT really made the practice of putting emojis everywhere explode.
yawnxyz
tell it to: "Output documentation in the style of MDN" and it looks way more professional
asah
not true! it's read by other LLMs! /s
drob518
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.
seanwilson
> They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems.
I think everyone on the team should get involved in this kind of feedback because raw first impressions on new content (which you can only experience once, and will be somewhat similar to impatient new users) is super valuable.
I remember as a dev flagging some tech marketing copy aimed at non-devs as confusing and being told by a manager not to give any more feedback like that because I wasn't in marketing... If your own team that's familiar with your product is a little confused, you can probably x10 that confusion for outside users, and multiply that again if a dev is confused by tech content aimed at non-devs.
I find it really common as well that you get non-tech people writing about tech topics for marketing and landing pages, and because they only have a surface level understanding of the the tech the text becomes really vague with little meaning.
And you'll get lots devs and other people on the team agreeing in secret the e.g. the product homepage content isn't great but are scared to say anything because they feel they have to stay inside their bubble and there isn't a culture of sharing feedback like that.
loudmax
AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers.
But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre, technical documentation based on a halfheartedly updated wiki and the README files and comments scattered in the developers' code base. A lot of projects don't just have poor technical documentation, they have no technical documentation.
shiroiuma
Exactly. My team's technical documentation is written (in English) by people who don't speak English natively, and it's awful, barely comprehensible many times because these people don't understand articles ("the" and "a") very well and constantly omit them or use the wrong ones. And aside from the poor English, the documentation itself is just bad.
AI would do a great job of fixing their writing, but they don't want to use it, because it's not an official part of "the process".
>and comments scattered in the developers' code base
I'm not so sure about this one. Most devs I've worked with don't use comments.
phendrenad2
"Tech writer" refers to a specific profession, not "programmer when they write docs". But with the second definition, I agree with you
TimByte
In my experience, great tech writers quietly function as a kind of usability radar. They're often the first people to notice that a workflow is confusing
throwaw12
> 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
dxdm
Realistically, PMs incentives are often aligned elsewhere.
But even if a PM cares about UX, they are often not in a good position to spot problems with designs and flows they are closely involved in and intimately familiar with.
Having someone else with a special perspective can be very useful, even if their job provides other beneficial functions, too. Using this "resource" is the job of the PM.
the_other
I'm with the grandparent comment.
> But even if a PM cares about UX,
How can a PM do their job if they don't *care* about UX?
I mean... I know exactly happens because I've seen it more than once: the product slowly goes to shit. You get a bunch of PMs at various levels of seniority all pursuing separate goals, not collaborating, not actually working together to compose a coherent product; their production teams are actively encouraged to be siloed; features collide and overlap, or worse conflict; every component redefines what a button looks like; bundles bloat; you have three different rendering tools (ok, I've not seen that in practice but it seems to be encouraged by many "best practices") etc etc
drob518
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.
eszed
I take your point, but a good PM will have been inside the decision-making process and carry embedded assumptions about how things should work, so they'll miss things. An outside eye - whether it's QA, user-testing, (as here) the technical writer, or even asking someone from a different team to take an informal look - is an essential part of designing anything to be used by humans.
falcor84
> I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.
I think I agree, at least in the current state of AI, but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing. I did have some limited success with getting Claude Code to go through tutorials (actually implementing each step as they go), and then having it iterate on the tutorial, but it's definitely not at the level of a human tech writer.
Would you be willing to take a stab at the competencies that a future AI agent would require to be excellent at this (or possibly never achieve)? I mean, TFA talks about "empathy" and emotions and feeling the pain, but I can't help feel that this wording is a bit too magical to be useful.
drob518
I don’t know that it can be well-defined. It might be asking something akin to “What makes something human?” For usability, one needs a sense of what defines “user pain” and what defines “reasonableness.” No product is perfect. They all have usability problems at some level. The best usability experts, and tech writers who do this well, have an intuition for user priorities and an ability to identify and differentiate large usability problems from small ones.
falcor84
Thinking about this some more now, I can imagine a future in which we'll see more and more software for which AI agents are the main users.
For tech documentation, I suppose that AI agents would mainly benefit from Skills files managed as part of the tool's repo, and I absolutely do imagine future AI agents being set up (e.g. as part of their AGENTS.md) to propose PRs to these Skills as they use the tools. And I'm wondering whether AI agents might end up with different usability concerns and pain-points from those that we have.
TimByte
A good tech writer knows why something matters in context: who is using this under time pressure, what they're afraid of breaking, what happens if they get it wrong
SecretDreams
> but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing.
We have to ask AI questions for it to do things. We have to probe it. A human knows things and will probe others, unprompted. It's why we are actually intelligent and the LLM is a word guesser.
CuriouslyC
Current AI writing is slightly incoherent. It's subtle, but the high level flow/direction of the writing meanders so things will sometimes seem a bit non-sequitur or contradictory.
richardw
It has no sense of truth or value. You need to check what it wrote and you need to tell it what’s important to a human. It’ll give you the average, but misses the insight.
killerstorm
True.
Also true that most tech writers are bad. And companies aren't going to spend >$200k/year on a tech writer until they hit tens of millions in revenue. So AI fills the gap.
As a horror story, our docs team didn't understand that having correct installation links should be one of their top priorities. Obviously if a potential customer can't install product, they'd assume it's bs and try to find an alternative. It's so much more important than e.g. grammar in a middle of some guide.
tech_tuna
Agreed, they overlap with QA engineers and Product Managers, with some level of technical skill on their own e.g. they might know Python pretty well.
DeborahWrites
Yeah. AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement. The companies with the best docs will absolutely still have tech writers, just with some AI assistance.
Tech writing seems especially vulnerable to people not really understanding the job (and then devaluing it, because "everybody can write" - which, no, if you'll excuse the slight self-promotion but it saves me repeating myself https://deborahwrites.com/blog/nobody-can-write/)
In my experience, tech writers often contribute to UX and testing (they're often the first user, and thus bug reporter). They're the ones who are going to notice when your API naming conventions are out of whack. They're also the ones writing the quickstart with sales & marketing impact. And then, yes, they're the ones bringing a deep understanding of structure and clarity.
I've tried AI for writing docs. It can be helpful at points, but my goodness I would not want to let anything an AI wrote out the door without heavy editing.
Nextgrid
> it won't be a GOOD replacement
See my other comment - I'm afraid quality only matters if there is healthy competition which isn't the case for many verticals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631038
FeteCommuniste
> AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement.
[insert Pawn Stars meme]: "GOOD docs? Sorry, best I can do is 'slightly better than useless.'"
topaz0
with the occasional "much worse than useless" thrown in as a bonus
shiroiuma
>AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement.
That's fine, though: as long as the AI's output is better than "completely and utterly useless", or even "nonexistent", it'll be an improvement in many places.
sehugg
The best tech writers I've known have been more like anthropologists, bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. With this perspective they often give feedback that makes the product better.
oenton
> bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. At my work (FAANG) tech writers are being let go and their responsibilities are being pushed on developers, who are now supposed to “use AI” to maintain customer facing documentation.
Is this the promise land? It sure doesn’t feel like it.
TimByte
AI can help with synthesis once those insights exist, but it doesn't naturally occupy that liminal space between groups, or sense the cultural and organizational gaps
ainiriand
And here I am, 2026, and one of my purposes for this year is to learn to write better, communicate more fluently, and convey my ideas in a more attractive way.
I do not think that these skills are so easily replaced; certainly the machine can do a lot, but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life.
In my humble opinion we will be losing that from people, the upscaling of skills will be lost for sure, but the human upscaling is the real loss.
jraph
> but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life.
Yep, and reading you will feel less boring.
The uniform style of LLMs gets old fast and I wouldn't be surprised if it were a fundamental flaw due to how they work.
And it's not even sure speed gains from using LLMs make up for the skill loss in the long term.
duskdozer
Seriously. It wasn't always this way, but now as soon I notice the LLM-isms in a chunk of text, I can feel my brain shut off.
jraph
You're absolutely right! It's not just the brain shutoffs—it's the feeling of death inside.
elcapitan
Scanning for LLM garbage is now one of the first things I do when reading a larger piece of text that has been published post ChatGPT.
ainiriand
It is such a challenge! As English is not my first language I have to do some mind gimnastics to really convey my thoughts. 'On writing well' is on my list to read, it is supposed to help.
jraph
It is a challenge!
I'll take imperfect ESL writing or imperfect writing in my native language over LLM soup any day.
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.
ThrowawayR2
Given the steady parade of headlines on HN about workers supposedly being replaced by AI, it seems fairly self-evident that the first interpretation is the less likely of the two.
motbus3
I like the post but we can learn from insurance companies.
They have AI finding reasons to reject totally valid requests
They are putting to court that this is a software bug and they should not be liable.
That will be the standard excuse. I hope it does not work.
InMice
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.
marcosdumay
> Is it expected that LLMs will continue to improve over time?
By whom?
Your expectations aren't the same everybody has.
InMice
I dont have any expectations. Thats why I was asking
marcosdumay
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.
LtWorf
The LLM can't actually use the product and realise that the description is wrong.
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.
shiroiuma
>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:
I'm sure their slop looks FAR better than the garbage my coworkers write. I really wish my coworkers would use AI to edit their writing, because then it might actually be comprehensible.
aniou
First, we've fallen into a nomenclature trap, as so-called "AI" has nothing to do with "intelligence." Even its creators admit this, hence the name "AGI," since the appropriate acronym has already been used.
But, when we use "AI" acronym, our brains still recognize "intelligence" attribute and tend to perceive LLMs as more powerful than they actually are.
Current models are like trained parrots that can draw colored blocks and insert them into the appropriate slots. Sure, much faster and with incomparably more data. But they're still parrots.
This story and the discussions remind me of reports and articles about the first computers. People were so impressed by the speed of their mathematical calculations that they called them "electronic brains" and considered, even feared, "robot intelligence."
Now we're so impressed by the speed of pattern matching that we called them "artificial intelligence," and we're back to where we are.
aurareturn
But you might not need 5 tech writers anymore. Just 1 who controls an LLM.
theletterf
Perhaps. Could the same be said for engineers?
aurareturn
Yes. That could be said for engineers as well.
If the business can no longer justify 5 engineers, then they might only have 1.
I've always said that we won't need fewer software developers with AI. It's just that each company will require fewer developers but there will be more companies.
IE:
2022: 100 companies employ 10,000 engineers
2026: 1000 companies employ 10,000 engineers
The net result is the same for emplyoment. But because AI makes it that much more efficient, many businesses that weren't financially viable when it needed 100 engineers might become viable with 10 engineers + AI.
SturgeonsLaw
There's another scenario... 100 companies employ 1000 engineers
ap99
Yes and no.
Five engineers could be turned into maybe two, but probably not less.
It's the 'bus factor' at play. If you still want human approvals on pull requests then If one of those engineers goes on vacation or leaves the company you're stuck with one engineer for a while.
If both leave then you're screwed.
If you're a small startup, then sure there are no rules and it's the wild west. One dev can run the world.
marginalia_nu
This was true even before LLMs. Development has always scaled very poorly with team size. A team of 20 heads is like at most twice as productive as a team of 5, and a team of 5 is marginally more productive than a team of 3.
Peak productivity has always been somewhere between 1-3 people, though if any one of those people can't or won't continue working for one reason or another, it's generally game over for the project. So you hire more.
This is why small software startups time and time again manage to run circles around with organizations with much larger budgets. A 10 person game studio like Team Cherry can release smash hit after smash hit, while Ubisoft with 170,000% the personnel count visibly flounders. Imagine doing that in hardware, like if you could just grab some buddies and start a business successfully competing with TSMC out of your garage. That's clearly not possible. But in software, it actually is.
matwood
That assumes your backlog is finite.
Is the tech writers backlog also seemingly infinite like every tech backlog I've ever seen?
imtringued
The tech writer backlog is probably worse, because writing good documentation requires extensive experience with the software you're writing documentation about and there are four types of documentation you need to produce.
DeborahWrites
Yes. Yes it is.
ekidd
Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years.
I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have banned at least one person from ever writing a commit message or pull request again, because Claude will explain it better.
Now, most people don't know to squeeze that much productivity out of it, most corporate procurement would take 9 months to buy a bucket if it was raining money outside, and it's possible to turn your code into unmaintainable slop at warp speed. And Claude is better at writing code than it is at almost anything else, so the rest of y'all are safe for a while.
But if you think that tech writers, or translators, or software developers are the only people who are going to get hit by waves of downsizing, then you're not paying attention.
Even if the underlying AI tech stalls out hard and permanently in 2026, there's a wave of change coming, and we are not ready. Nothing in our society, economy or politics is ready to deal with what's coming. And that scares me a bit these days.
aniou
"And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day".
Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from?
I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
raincole
We have been seeing this happen in real time in the past two years, no?
amelius
Yes. But they are now called managers.
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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 experience a foreign public transit system. I improve my writing by walking in my readers' shoes and experiencing their confusion. Empathy is the engine that powers my work.
Most of my information is carefully collected from a network of people I have a good relationship with, and from a large and trusting audience. It took me years to build the infrastructure to surface useful information. AI can only report what someone was bothered to write down, but I actually go out in the real world and ask questions.
I have built tools to collect people's experience at the immigration office. I have had many conversations with lawyers and other experts. I have interviewed hundreds of my readers. I have put a lot of information on the internet for the first time. AI writing is only as good as the data it feeds on. I hunt for my own data.
People who think that AI can do this and the other things have an almost insulting understanding of the jobs they are trying to replace.