We Got What We Asked For
For, well… just about the history of the profession, technical writers have been making a particular argument that goes something like: what we do is not just writing. We’re information architects. User advocates. Content strategists sitting at the intersection of product, engineering, and support. We manage knowledge systems. We shape the experience of anyone who has ever been confused by software. Many of us have backgrounds in curriculum and instruction; in technical fields; in visual arts.
I’ve made this argument many times, to many people who I would have preferred just trust me to handle the job I’m paid for.
And guess what: we’ve always been right. And it seems that companies have finally heard us.
But hearing is different than listening…
AI tools can now produce a reasonable first draft of most technical documentation. Not great documentation—you still need a human-in-the-loop for accuracy, coherence, and readability—but something far superior to a blank page. And as AI has gotten better at the “just writing” part of technical writing, organizations have started internalizing the message we have been sending for years: the valuable part of what technical writers do isn’t the writing itself. It’s the judgment, the architecture, the strategy.
Great. Mission accomplished.
Except… being recognized as the strategic layer means there’s a different calculus happening behind the scenes for our employers. Companies don’t budget for “strategic layers” the same way they budget for “writers who produce X pages per sprint.” What they actually do see an opportunity to eliminate positions and leave one person standing with the expectation that they’ll do the strategic work and review the AI output and maintain the information architecture and still ship the same documentation volume as before.
The job title says Technical Writer. The job description says something like “Content Strategist, AI Governance, Documentation Product Manager, and also please update the API reference with new example Python scripts.. you know Python, right?”
In a podcast recording from Tom Johnson’s terrific blog I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom and his guest Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti introduced me to the concept of the “Bug Zero” paradox: when AI tools give you enough capacity to handle everything, everything becomes your job. You went from having a workflow to being the workflow. The productivity gain doesn’t make your work easier—it makes it bigger, because the surface area expands to fill whatever efficiency you’ve created.
Like a cat in a clear plastic tub. (That’s my analogy, not Tom or Fabrizio. You’re welcome.)
To be fair, I don’t think our original argument was wrong. Saying “technical writing is more than writing” was true and important and it needed to be said. Junior writers deserve to have their work understood. The profession deserved to be seen.
But the argument we made was easy to co-opt. We were trying to say: recognize the full scope of what this work requires. What many companies heard instead was: the hard part is strategy; the easy part is writing; the easy part can now be automated. And in the absence of a second argument—one about what documentation debt actually costs, or what happens to your AI tooling when it has no quality knowledge base to learn from—the first argument became a justification for cuts or for increasing pace and velocity without increasing headcount.
(There’s a real irony here: documentation quality is increasingly what determines whether AI tools are reliable. “RTFM” applies to AI, too. Companies that gut their documentation teams are actively degrading the accuracy of their AI products and tools. But this is a longer-term problem, and a lot of leadership operates on shorter cycles than that—especially in an economy with a lot of pessimism.)
I’m still working out what the next argument should be—the one that follows logically from “it’s more than writing” and doesn’t have the same vulnerability to being twisted into justification for lean staffing.
My current best guess is that it involves something like: strategy without time isn’t strategy, it’s just triage. That the question isn’t whether one person can theoretically hold the content strategy vision for an entire organization with AI support, but whether they can do it well—with the rigor and care that makes documentation actually useful—given the constraints of being one person with a finite number of hours. (There’s a related version of this problem happening at the entry level, too.)
But “we’re doing more with less” is considered a success metric in an industry where access to capital is getting tighter. So we’re in for some long work days.
The monkey’s paw did its thing: we asked to be seen as more than writers. That happened. Now we get to figure out what to do with it. (The job—not the monkey’s paw).
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