Guest post by: Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
Yes, you, who are thinking about not hiring a technical writer this year or, worse, erased one or more technical writing positions last year because of AI.
You, who are buying into the promise of docs entirely authored by LLMs without expert oversight or guidance.
You, who unloaded the weight of docs on your devs’ shoulders, as if it was a trivial chore.
It’s been a complicated year, 2025. When even Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s founders, admits, in a fit of Oppenheimerian guilt, to feeling lost, you know that no one holds the key to the future. We flail and dance around these new totems made of words, which are neither intelligent nor conscious, pretending they can replace humans while, in fact, they’re glorified tools.
You might think that the plausible taste of AI prose is all you need to give your products a voice. You paste code into a field, and something that resembles docs comes out after a few minutes. Like an anxious student, eager to turn homework in, you might be tempted to content yourself with docs theatre, thinking that it’ll earn you a good grade. It won’t, because docs aren’t just artifacts.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
— The Princess Bride
When you say “docs”, you’re careful to focus on the output, omitting the process. Perhaps you don’t know how docs are produced. You’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that docs are product truth; that without them, software becomes unusable, because software is never done, is never obvious, and is never simple. ...
