passo.uno

> Whoever speaks badly, thinks badly and lives badly. We must find the right words: words are important! —Nanni Moretti A reader reached out to me the other day to talk about the future of tech writing as a profession. They asked me a pretty good question: What skills would you prioritize in this age of constant change and uncertainty? Is it AI? Maybe coding? Well, not really.

A friend of mine recently lost her job in a layoff. She looked at her résumé with a pang of despair and asked me for advice on what she should learn next. She hasn’t thrown in the towel on technical writing yet; she wants to find another tech writing job, despite the prevailing pessimism that besieges our craft. How does one upgrade to, say, content engineering, she asked.

Short definitions for terms that come up often in these posts. General terms Agentic workflow A sequence of tasks carried out by an AI agent that plans, calls tools, and checks its own output with limited human intervention, as opposed to a single prompt-response exchange. Docs as code The practice of treating documentation like source code: stored in version control, reviewed through pull requests, and built through the same pipelines as software.

Fourth episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this one, Tom and I chat with CT Smith about AI workflows, building tools that don’t depend on AI, the fear of skill atrophy, living intentionally offline, and why the line between developer and writer is starting to blur.

Instead of writing my tech comms predictions for next year like I did in 2024, I’ve written a fictionalized account of my day as a technical writer in 2030. It’ll be interesting to see whether we get there or not. Take it as a window into a possible future, one where AI usage is safer, more regulated, and better integrated with our workflows (as it should be).