At the start of the year, I wrote a trends post and noted uncertainty about the directions AI will take tech writers this year. (See My 2024 technical writing trends and predictions.) Now that we're into April, I have a better sense of how things are going and wanted to provide an update here. My main observation is that AI is accelerating my technical writing output, making me about twice as productive as before. Also noted in this post: prompt engineering is a non-obvious skill that many tech writers still struggle with, even though documentation is more within AI's sights than creative cont ..read more

A powerful way to reduce hallucination with AI tools is to supply an abundance of source material for the AI to draw upon. This article explores best practices for gathering and organizing that source material. I argue that you should be selective in what you include, preferring quality over quantity. Organize basic information first, then more advanced details. Include the reference output and any meeting notes ..read more

In this post, I chat with Keren Brown at Zoomin Software about best practices for integrating AI with documentation. Keren emphasizes the importance of first making your content AI-ready, which means ensuring that it's accurate and up to date, before incorporating AI features. We discuss the reasons companies adopt AI, how to overcome implementation challenges, common mistakes, creativity vs. hallucination, consolidating content, user behaviors, security concerns, and measuring success ..read more

How can you persuade potential employers about your API expertise? One of the strongest moves you can make is to share a link to your portfolio. The following is a guest post by Peter Gustafson, a technical writer who's had a lot of success with API documentation projects at many high-profile companies. I was chatting with Peter on Linkedin the other week about trends he's seeing in the field, and I asked him to write a guest post. In this post, he explains the importance of having an online portfolio that potential employers can easily access and browse ..read more

I added a new article to my prompt engineering series on populating documentation templates. In the article, I explain how to use AI to populate documentation templates with information that you've gathered. This technique can be a quick way to get an initial draft of documentation, which you can then edit and review with SMEs ..read more

I added another article to my prompt engineering series on reverse engineering prompts. Reverse engineering a prompt can mean a few different things, but in this article, I'm referring to deriving the likely prompt based on a given output. For example, you pass in some finished content and ask the AI to write a prompt that would produce a similar output. Although reverse engineering prompts might not be all that different from simply coming up with a template for docs, I added this article here to emphasize that you can get AI to write prompts for you, and many times these prompts are good. Th ..read more

I added a new topic to my prompt engineering series on summarizing meeting notes. The post details a 5-step process for using AI to turn meeting notes into actionable summaries that also increase your visibility within an organization. The process begins by transcribing meetings with AI tools and then asking an AI model to summarize the meeting, focusing on capturing rich detail and identifying action items ..read more

I added a new article about task decomposition to my prompt engineering series. The article explores how to break down complex tasks into smaller, easier-to-process steps for AI tools. The tutorial guides you through creating a complex tree diagram, demonstrating how task decomposition improves accuracy and efficiency ..read more

There's an upcoming conference called AI The Docs 2024: API Documentation and AI Best Practices, held April 3, 2024 online. The conference is put on by the same API the Docs group / Pronovix that holds other online conferences and events. I'll be one of the speakers. I'm planning to talk about prompt engineering ..read more

I recently visualized both a cloud and Java API through some complex tree diagrams that showed the objects returned, with all the detail inherent in the parent/child relationships and structures ..read more