Show Notes for Episode 5
Three tech writers and a photographer walk into a bar (with Tom Johnson and Floyd Jones)
Listen to Ep 5: [Spotify] [Apple podcasts] [Youtube]
Writers have a new audience, and it’s not human. How is this funny?
Tech writers - especially those working in software development - are mostly not writing for human readers directly anymore. Increasingly the job involves using automation to generate docs that will be consumed, re-rendered by AI, then parsed into code automation tools like CoPilot or Antigravity.
Tom Johnson, a technical writer at Google, publishes thoughts at idratherbewriting.com. In this episode, Tom sits down with Yuri, Matt, and Floyd, to talk about how AI has altered his work.
One thing we discovered: like many (but not all!) highly successful, smart people, Tom is genuinely thoughtful, friendly, and good-natured. And yet, he still agreed to appear with us!
Calling back to our interview with Jobst Landgrebe and Chris Fregly, we talk through some of the predictions, fears, and pressure that surround AI.
Yuri talks about how challenging it is to explain his constant AI experiments with colleagues who are paying less attention. The constant change, the innovation, the surprising discoveries, even a sense of isolation - all these can characterize the journey of learning how to use and understand various AI tools.
Meanwhile, every person we talk to seems to have a completely different perspective on AI - what it is, what it’s becoming, and what changes it’s making to the world of work. We hear radically different opinions from developers, investors, philosophers, skeptics, and researchers.
Will AI kick all software developers into the street by Easter? Or do they simply need to learn a few prompts, maybe re-word their job title, and make a small nap area under their desk to survive this current layoff binge?
As for technical writers, they don’t even describe the job the same way. This role, which has always been specialized depending on what domain it operates in, is in a prime position to be transformed by the advent of LLMs.
Tom provides some good insights into just how much AI has transformed his work documenting APIs. But he also brings lots of interesting ideas and book recommendations to the party.
Finally, Floyd brings us home with a short anecdote about taxonomy.
Notes and episodes: worldbrainnoexperts.substack.com