Some people dismiss AI as a temporary novelty, yet another instance of someone proclaiming tech writers will become extinct only to find that the hype soon passes and tech writers are still needed. We watched false promises about our extinction fizzle with wikis and crowdsourcing, UX writing, and YouTube videos, all of which promised to make tech writers obsolete. But what about AI? We’re still in the Kool-aid drinking phase of AI as we wait to see how it plays out. But never has anything so impacted the tech comm profession as AI. Some say AI is more transformational than electricity, PCs, or the Internet. How, then, might AI transform the practice of tech comm?

Even if AI capabilities don’t make us obsolete, another outcome is likely: tech writers who know how to apply AI will have an edge over those who don’t. For tech writers looking to leverage that edge, how do you use AI in a way that’s helpful, that doesn’t lead to hallucinated works of instructional fiction? How do you use AI to eliminate the boring, tedious parts of technical writing? For the user experience, how do you structure your content in ways that lead to the best AI chat outcomes? 

In this presentation, I’ll explore strategies tech writers can use to get an edge using AI.  Specifically, I’ll explore the following AI topics as they related to tech comm:

Take-aways:

• Pattern-based prompt engineering using tech comm patterns and rules
• Writing advanced scripts to build, publish, and deploy reference docs
• Performing advanced document analysis in developer portals
• Documenting and understanding code
• Optimizing AI chat experiences

In contrast to other AI discussions, I’ll avoid speculation, exaggeration, or abstract theory and focus more on practical AI as it relates to the practice of technical writing.