Code Wiki, a new AI tool by Google, claims to generate a complete set of docs, including diagrams, from code repos. The landing page goes as far as saying “Stop documenting. No more stale docs. Ever”, a claim that made me stagger and reach for the nearest chair.

That these tools are laughably bad isn’t reassuring; their emergence hints at a deeper and more unsettling cultural problem.

The dam of AI-written doc contributions might be about to break. It’s already cracking for code, with posts wondering how to review a vibe-coded pull request consisting of nine thousand new lines of code. In the midst of what Tom Johnson describes as acceleration, docs-as-code writers wonder how to contain the seemingly inescapable wave that could bury their backlogs in AI slop. The answer could lie in taking a stance. This means crafting an AI policy for docs.

I really enjoyed speaking at Write the Docs Berlin this year. My talk was a bit special, a message in a bottle for writers who are struggling — for anyone who’s struggling in their careers, really. Here are the recording and the slides, as well as some links to the content that inspired the talk. I hope you’ll find it useful.

Second episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this episode, Tom and I talk about MCP servers with Anandi Knuppel. As Anandi says, “wherever there are words with regards to a technical product, that’s the technical writer’s domain”. Don’t miss it!

If you’ve been following the AI space for a while, the MCP acronym might be a familiar sight: it’s an open standard for connecting large language models (LLMs) to tools and data. Without the ability to use tools and get data, AI agents are powerless, their knowledge limited to their training set and the context at hand. Giving in to my curiosity, I created an MCP server to demystify this piece of tech and gain a better understanding of its potential.

Not all is rosy, but if there’s a place where doc tools need to grow, it’s this.

Kate Mueller’s The Not-Boring Tech Writer is one of my favorite tech writing podcasts. In Growing as a technical writer in the AI era, Kate and I talked about the Seven-action Docs Model and how to grow as a tech writer. Don’t miss it!

It’s official! Tom Johnson and I teamed up to start an AI & Docs podcast! We had this idea brewing for a while and finally got to record the thing.

You might have read Annie Mueller’s post poking fun at developers’ tutorials. If you haven’t yet, do it now. On the surface, it’s an exquisite rendition of the kind of technobabble we tech writers get to tame every day. Reactions among devs ranged from nervous snickering to outright shame. Like all the best parodies, Annie’s goes deeper than that, though: It puts a finger on “documentation theater”, a state where docs are performative and not addressing a need nor caring about it. Let me explain why I think writing docs because you are forced to is worse than not having docs at all.

I sometimes lurk on /r/technicalwriting to gauge the interests and sentiments of the community. What I’ve noticed over the years is that pessimism and anxiety have always been quite high; Reddit, it seems, can be a powerful outlet for all sorts of feelings. Here I’d like to analyze and address some of the challenging ones. If you had similar thoughts, I hope my words will prove useful.

Docs are a product. Contributing to them is among the finest forms of product engagement. Bystanders can become builders and authors: They contribute a verse so that the powerful play can go on. They cease being the product to become the owners of the product narrative. And in this AI age, where docs matter more than ever, users who write can steer the future of products.