AI

Every technical writer I know has the same complicated relationship with AI documentation tools. You try one. It generates fast, fluent, confidently structured output. You read it and immediately know something is wrong, but it takes a minute to place exactly what. The audience is off. The doc type does not match what the source material actually supports. There are three paragraphs explaining a concept the target reader already knows, and no explanation of the thing they actually need. The tool wrote well. It just wrote the wrong thing. ...

Technical writers build content. UX designers build interfaces. For twenty years, these two disciplines have operated in separate buildings, separate tools, separate reporting lines. That worked when documentation lived on a portal and the product lived on a screen. Users moved between two worlds: the application where they did their work, and the help center where they went when they got stuck. That world is ending. AI chatbots now pull documentation into the product and surface it as conversational answers. In-app guidance layers docs content directly onto the interface. Newer tools can expose your knowledge base as something an AI assistant can query directly. The documentation portal is no longer the destination. It is the backend data source for five different delivery surfaces, and neither the tech writer nor the UX designer fully owns the pipeline that connects them. ...