I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

I gave a presentation to the Write the Docs Australia group on using AI to write release notes using file diffs, on Feb 16, 2025. Here's the recording, presentation description, and transcript.

It's that time of year again when we take to analyzing trends. If you know me, you're probably gearing up for a load of AI-optimistic predictions because, as I've noted in previous posts like Unpacking the issues from AI, I'm an AI optimist. However, my AI optimism isn't based on hype or the current tech zeitgeist. Rather, I'm an AI optimist because my daily experiences usi...

This podcast explores GenAI in technical documentation scenarios, highlighting the AI features and capabilities provided in Document360. I talk with Saravana Kumar, CEO of Kovai.co, which makes Document360, about how AI is changing search functionality and reducing support costs in knowledge bases. We discuss practical applications of AI for technical writers, including automated tagging, SEO opti...

This tutorial will help you understand task decomposition by guiding you through the process of creating a complex tree diagram that's too sophisticated for an AI tool to create at once. Whether you're creating tree diagrams or not, it doesn't matter. This is just an example of how to break down complex information into smaller chunks and pass it into AI.

One of the advantages of recent Gen AI updates is the massive token input context. When you can pass in an entire set of documentation as an input, you have a much stronger possibility for powerful prompts. In this tutorial, I share some quality-control prompts you can use that deal with entire doc sets as inputs, as well as explain some of the challenges in passing in an entire doc set.

You can use AI prompts when creating release notes for APIs by leveraging file diffs from regenerated reference documentation. The file diffs from version control tools provide a reliable, precise information source about what's changed in the release.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use AI to populate documentation templates with the source material you've gathered. For example, API overviews often follow a highly structured template. This technique can be a quick way to get an initial draft of documentation, which you can then edit and review with SMEs.

One of the most successful strategies for using AI is to pass in an abundance of source material that can augument and inform the AI's responses. In this tutorial, I cover strategies for gathering this material, including what types of documents to look for, optimal ordering, pitfalls to look out for such as outdated or slanted information, and more.

For AI tools to generate accurate information for documentation you're writing, you need to pass in source material. This usually means meeting with engineers and product managers to gather information about the product. In this tutorial, I share prompts for turning those meeting transcriptions into organized, readable meeting summaries. These cleaned up summaries can then function as input co...

In this podcast episode, I talk with Keren Brown, VP of Marketing and Value at Zoomin Software, about strategies for technical writers to demonstrate their value within their organizations, especially in light of recent layoffs in the tech industry. We discuss aligning documentation work with high-priority initiatives, quantifying the impact of technical writing, and making this work visible to ex...

In this podcast, I chat with Bob Watson about an upcoming API documentation course he'll be teaching at the University of Washington. Bob has extensive experience working as an API technical writer at big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The UW reached out to Bob to develop this new course offering. The 14-week evening course will cover fundamentals like understanding develop...

I've been mulling over whether to write a trends post this year. There's so much uncertainty, it's hard to feel confident about how the tech writing profession will play out. But little trends-related ideas keep surfacing in the back of my mind, so I decided to write out some of my thoughts. Before I jump into this, I want to say that I’m much more agnostic and unsure about directions...

These are some notes and thoughts from reading Robert Pirsig's classic philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. My reading here focuses more on the technical writing aspects and themes from the book. Some themes include Classic versus Romantic modes of thought, the concept of Quality, our relationship with technology, doing your own maintenance, caring...

I recently gave a webinar titled 'Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective' on December 8, 2023. The webinar was sponsored by the STC Washington, DC - Baltimore Chapter. In this presentation, I shared some personal experiences in using AI for different writing-related use cases, explaining what I’ve found helpful. These use cases and takeaways were all experiential...

In this post, I provide over 30 real-life examples of how I'm using AI on a daily basis, not just for technical writing tasks but more broadly in life, including summarizing content, explaining concepts, answering questions, troubleshooting problems, and having engaging conversations for a variety of tasks and scenarios. In my view, AI use cases are ubiquitous, equivalent to the use cases for...

In this podcast, I talk with Ed Marsh about podcasting. You may have listened to Ed Marsh's Content Content podcast previously. As an experienced podcaster, Ed has a lot of insights and thoughts about podcasting. We discuss what initially drew him to start podcasting, the equipment and logistics involved in podcasting, different formats that engage listeners (from co-hosts to single person pod...

In this episode, I chat with Dan Grabski, a senior content developer based in Portland, both about his recent WTD talk titled 'Zen and the Art of Manually Creating API Documentation' and Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' Dan explains the importance of focusing not just on technical details of implementations but also on integrating the people side &am...

In this short podcast, I explore using AI tools to do research, the potential for fake URLs, and how to deal with the fabrication. I started by using Claude to summarize a podcast and provide a list of salient points, including the potential counterargument. What I didn't expect was for Claude to fabricate a list of imagined research and then summarize the fictitious research to conclude that...

In Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett describe how the Dutch achieved so much cycling success, and how other cities might do the same. The authors bring up a variety of techniques and approaches the Dutch have used, such as seamlessly integrating cycling with public transit, pursuing customized strategies based on each city's unique l...

You can use AI tools like Claude to help you write full-length content. By going paragraph-by-paragraph, you can direct the AI while seemingly maintaining your own voice and ideas. However, despite my attempts to use AI with writing, I've found that it's harder to pull off than I thought. I can get close, but due to the way AI tools are trained, they inevitably steer into explanation more...

In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, a tech writer in Barcelona who blogs at passo.uno and works for Splunk, about various AI news topics. We talk about the Forrester AI jobs impact forecast, the community element in documentation, the way the profession is changing with AI, content design roles with LLMs, how complex processes and interactions can't be automated, whether the...

In conversations about AI, a lot of tech writers are asking what kind of scenarios is AI good for? What works, what doesn’t? In which scenarios? You may have read my responses to these questions before in previous posts, but this time I recorded a podcast with slides. In the podcast, I try to pull together these ideas into more of a narrative shape and flow. This podcast focuses on clarifying thos...

This is a recording of a presentation called Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey, which I gave to a company's private tech comm event. With their permission, I'm posting it here. You can watch the recording via YouTube or listen the audio file as a podcast.

In this podcast, I chat with Adam Altman all about Redocly, an authoring/publishing tool for creating API documentation. Topics we discuss include why he started Redocly, the approach to API doc tools, what explains the continued popularity of Redocly, the docs-as-code approach to API tooling, and more.

Archbee is a relatively new documentation tool that offers a block-based editor, API publishing capability, content re-use, and more. The initial version of Archbee was released in early 2019. Since then, the product has been steadily ramping up in features and growing its customer base. In this podcast, I chat with Claudiu Dascalescu about Archbee, the features driving its adoption, their target...