• Foundations -- core concepts of knowledge management
• Knowledge Assets -- creation, maintenance, and preservation
• Knowledge Creation -- how ideas become knowledge assets
• Knowledge Discovery -- helping people find and use information

"An engineer named Siddhant Khare wrote recently about what he called “AI fatigue” — the exhaustion that comes not from creating but from reviewing. Before AI, his day had a rhythm: think about a problem, write code, test it, ship it. After AI, his day became a loop of prompting, waiting, reading output, evaluating output, deciding if the output was correct, deciding if it was safe, fixing the parts that weren’t, and re-prompting. He described it as becoming a quality inspector on a conveyor belt that never stops. The work was faster but emptier. The flow states that used to sustain him — the deep, energizing focus of building something yourself — had been replaced by the shallow, draining focus of judging something you didn’t build.

Not every writer experiences this the same way. For some, the shift is actually liberating. If your day job involves writing yet another SDK migration guide or documenting the fine-grained differences between configuration parameters across product tiers — content you won’t remember in a month — there’s no loss of creative joy when the machine drafts it for you. You become the editor, not the author, and you save your real creative energy for work that matters to you personally. The fatigue isn’t from reviewing; it’s from pretending that all documentation deserves the same emotional investment. Some of it is toil, and outsourcing toil is fine.

But here’s the tension: if you stop caring about the work the machine produces, who maintains the quality? This is where the concept of ownership becomes critical. The tech writers who thrive in this landscape aren’t the ones who wait for engineers to hand them drafts to edit. They’re the ones who own the reference documentation, who run diffs against every API release, who update architectural diagrams, who maintain a single source of truth..."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/judging-beautiful-docs-ai-fatigue-podcast

#TechnicalWriting #AI #GenerativeAI #SoftwareDocumentation #TechnicalCommunication #Docs #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

The cost of not documenting software AKA why software companies will continue to need to hire and keep technical writers:

"Perhaps bizarrely, "the best documented game" in CD Projekt's history according to Ruciński is spin-off Witcher cardgame Gwent. "In a live service environment, which you could argue Gwent was, it is easy to say that you don't have the time to document everything, because the game is changing so fast," he said. "It receives patches, new content, new balance, every month. So all those documents need to be constantly updated, and somebody has to do that. It is a cost."

The developers opted to "pay this documentation tax upfront", however, rather than kick it down the road. As a result, said Ruciński, "new artists, new coders, new designers could jump onto any task within Gwent and contribute instantly." This demonstrates that "documentation doesn't have to slow you down, you don't have to think of documentation as something that will only be useful years later. Documentation can actually speed you up, make you faster right now."

Things didn't go nearly so well during the creation of Cyberpunk 2077 – a "true test of scale" for CD Projekt's technical writers. "Cyberpunk was a fresh start, but it came with new problems," Fulneczek recalled. "It was a massive undertaking. The hopes and expectations surrounding it were enormous. Internally, we had our documentation tool, Confluence, we had a proof of concept of 'living' documentation, so we thought, we were ready.

"But it turned out we weren't, because Cyberpunk was the first project of this scale, this size that we documented, and it also took a very long time," he went on. "And during those eight, nine years of development, we created over 8000 pages of documentation, and that's because of how complex this project was, and it also had many iterations along the way..."

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/it-was-chaos-how-the-witcher-4-and-cyberpunk-2-are-learning-from-decades-of-cd-projekts-documentation-mistakes

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #Documentation #Videogames #TechnicalCommunication

For the forseeable future, AI tools will continue to generate such incomplete and sometime hallucinated outputs that there will be a continuing need for a "human-in-the-loop" to not only use several LLMs to review each other's output but to fact-check the final output. Using one LLM alone results in mediocre quality. Using two LLMs results in (sometimes very) good quality. Use three LLMs with human verification for great/outstanding results.

"1,131 people across the documentation industry responded to the 2026 State of Docs survey — more than 2.5x the number of respondents last year. But the size of the sample matters less than what it represents: a genuine cross-section of the people who create, manage, evaluate, and depend on documentation.

Documentation’s role in purchase decisions is stable and strong, and the case that docs drive business value is well established. The shift this year is in what documentation is being asked to do, and who — and what — is consuming it.

AI has crossed the mainstream threshold for documentation, both in how docs get written and how they get consumed. Users are arriving through AI-powered search tools, coding assistants, and MCP servers. Documentation is becoming the data layer that feeds AI products, onboarding wizards, and developer tools. The teams investing in this shift are treating documentation as context infrastructure, not just a collection of pages.

But adoption has outrun governance, and the gap matters. Most teams are using AI without guidelines in place, and documentation carries a higher accuracy bar than most content. After all, one wrong instruction can break a user’s implementation and erode trust in the product.
(...)
Writers are spending less time drafting and more time fact-checking, validating, and building the context systems that make AI output worth refining."

https://www.stateofdocs.com/2026/introduction-and-demographics

#TechnicalWriting #TechnicalCommunication #SoftwareDocumentation #DocsAsProduct #AI #GenerativeAI

Today's Featured Links post links to articles about how scientists are going to transport antimatter, using AI for technical documentation, why your next TV shouldn't be smart, and more.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2026/03/featured-links-march-18-2026.html

#AI, #History, #Medical, #Politics, #Science, #Software, #Space, #TechnicalCommunication, #Technology

"I’ve used AI to accelerate all my work, and yet, I’m still busy as ever. This is what I wrote about in Changing the AI narrative from liberation to acceleration. This notion that AI will do our work while we focus on other things … uh, yeah, that big chunk of time where Gemini does my work for me while I have time to daydream about system design and content architecture — that chunk of time never seems to materialize on my calendar. My days (which are often meetingless, actually) are filled with an endless queue of doc requests, needed updates, release notes, new features to document, and more.

So maybe as we peer into the future, signs of how it will play out are already present. It’s a bit like watching children grow up — the personality traits visible in the toddler years turn out to be the same ones you see in the adult. Five years from now, we might look back and say, why didn’t we see what was so clearly right there?

What is the pattern of the present? Acceleration, being busier than ever, all while using AI more than ever. If I instead noticed the opposite, a kind of winding down of my own activity and involvement while AI gradually takes on more and more of the activity of my day, that would tell a different story. The paradox is that AI is taking on more activity, but it’s pulling me along with it. I’m an active collaborator, shaping conversations, providing context, evaluating outputs, running verification, deciding the approaches, and so on. AI augments and accelerates our work rather than replacing it. We have the most powerful tools available to us, more so than at any time previously. Is it any wonder that we’re now building skyscrapers instead of doghouses, and that those skyscrapers require a lot of work?"

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/nobody-knows-two-years-from-now

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #TechnicalWriting #TechnicalCommunication

"The people best positioned to configure AI agents like Claude Code aren't engineers. They're technical writers.

It's a bold claim, so let me back it up.

Here's a file that powers an AI agent:

AGENTS.md

# AGENTS.md — API Documentation Repository

## Workflow Rules

- Human review required for API reference changes
- Style guide compliance checked automatically via CI
- Maximum 3 AI revision cycles before human takeover

## Escalation

- Writer agent fails after 3 attempts → human writer takes over
- Reviewer agent flags accuracy concern → SME review required
Markdown syntax, structured headings, rules about workflows and handoffs. If you've written a README, a style guide, or onboarding documentation, this looks familiar because it that's effectively what it is. The files that configure AI agents are Markdown files with structured frontmatter. They're documentation.

The difference is the audience: instead of a human colleague, you're writing for an AI model that's highly knowledgeable but has zero institutional memory. The challenge is one technical communicators already navigate: deciding what to include, how to structure it, and what level of detail serves the reader.

So what kinds of files are involved?"

https://instructionmanuel.com/agent-configs-are-docs

#TechnicalWriting #AI #LLMs #AIAgents #AgenticAI #TechnicalCommunication #Markdown #README

"In my post The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI, I mentioned an upcoming presentation I'm giving to students and faculty. I argue that the future of the profession is the cyborg model, where machines augment our capabilities rather than replace us. In this post, I share notes about what skills a tech writer would need to learn to thrive in this world of augmentation.

If you have feedback about these skills, let me know. My intent here is to demonstrate what actual skills should be emphasized for those entering the profession, or for those currently in the profession who want to get ahead with AI. Note that the following sections are mostly bullet points, in the form of notes."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/10-principles-of-cyborg-technical-writer

#TechnicalWriting #TechnicalCommunication #SoftwareDocumentation #Documentation #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

Indeed, we can't allow autopilot to head into a whirlwind...

"We may be doing docs-as-code, but docs are not code. Docs run on people, and people are a messy tangle of goals, skills, and emotions. When docs hit the brain, they meet varying expectations, knowledge levels, reading abilities, and needs. None of this can be reproduced or simplified to a single pattern, but good docs use structure and words wisely to produce the best possible linguistic shape that can land safely on most people’s heads. Only humans can decide whether that message is getting across in the right way.

Getting there is a balancing act between business needs, user needs, and your own. That’s the diplomatic tension that forces all good tech writers to slow down and consider all points of view in the room as if they were in the middle of a spaghetti Western standoff. Slowing down is a deliberate, necessary act in all crafts, and tech writing is no exception. No matter how fast LLMs can churn out drafts, they don’t understand the tension in tech writing, to which we’re adding AI itself as an additional consumer of docs.
(...)
The quality of the docs I produce is still high, I was saying. That’s because I’m not letting LLMs take the steering wheel, and because I’m building new habits around them: setting up guardrails, automating what can be automated, and keeping my hands on the decisions that matter. I can do that because I know what good docs look like, and because I’ve been doing this long enough to feel when something’s off. That intuition came from years of wrestling with products and watching users struggle with pages I thought were clear. AI can help me write faster. It cannot replace the slow accumulation of judgment that tells me when to stop."

https://passo.uno/real-cost-of-documentation/

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #AI #DocsAsCode #GenerativeAI #LLMs #SoftwareDevelopment #AISlop #Programming #TechnicalCommunication #Documentation

"Too often, API documentation writing is introduced as a series of rules or gut feeling about what seems obvious. Beginning writing, that’s a good approach. They’re easily understood and conform to. They’re rarely wrong. They’re far from complete, however.

API documentation writing is an art, not a science. As the artist, your influence is no less important than anyone else’s. But you’ll need to understand more in order to take the writing to a new level. You’ll need to know theory, the hows and whys, and to think like a programmer. The theory here is not only to connect with clients but also to present information in the most efficient way possible. It’s the last points that learning API documentation writing does not do well.

The following is a talk through. I talk about an element in conversational detail. I aim to discuss the important points, why an approach may be inappropriate, what the goals should be, and how to fix it. Along the way, I may make blunt statements. I do that for effect. By exposing the reason for the critique, we can get an understanding of the solution. We’ll look at this from the writer’s perspective."

https://robertdelwood.medium.com/improving-api-documentation-describing-one-parameter-at-a-time-cb53a89637a2?postPublishedType=initial

#TechnicalWriting #APIDocumentation #SoftwareDocumentation #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #APIs #TechnicalCommunication