New Letter To Those Who Fired Tech Writers Because Of AI 2026

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.

You are making a big mistake. But you can still undo the damage.

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. You 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 little more than 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 a 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

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. Producing those docs requires tech writers.

Tech writers go to great lengths to get the information they need. They write so that your audience can understand. They hunger for clarity and meaning and impact. They power through weeks full of deadlines, chasing product news, because without their reporting, most products wouldn’t thrive; some wouldn’t even exist. Their docs aren’t a byproduct: they tie the product together.

An LLM can’t do all that, because it can’t feel the pain of your users. It can’t put itself into their shoes. It lacks the kind of empathy that’s behind great help content. It does not, in fact, have any empathy at all, because it cannot care. You need folks who will care, because content is a hairy beast that can only be tamed by agents made of flesh and capable of emotions: humans.

You can’t generate docs on autopilot. Let me tell you why.

First, AI-generated docs are

Source: HackerNews