#content-engineering — Public Fediverse posts

Excited and exhausted: My honest take about life as a techwriter in the AI age

TL;DR: As professional writers, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring AI; it’s learn the skills or get left behind. Still, I’m excited because AI has genuinely made me more productive and work (personal and work-work) has become a lot more fun. However, I’m also exhausted because there’s so much to learn. However, rather than whine about it, I have decided to “attack” the challenge strategically.

Table of contents

A few weeks ago, I told my online tech writer friend Fabrizio of Passo.uno that I  wrote a whiny journal entry about how overwhelmed I was about the amount of things I have to learn about AI.

At the end of the conversation, I asked him to write a blog post about how we technically inclined writers can cope with the speed of change in AI tech and learn fast.  He kindly obliged me in a day, writing this fantastic post: Advice for tech writers on a job hunt in the AI age

I love his suggestions, especially #2, which is my favorite way to learn: create your own projects. I found #1 a bit challenging. Books and courses are my go-to way of learning. But it’s true what he said: things are changing so fast now that by the time a book is out, it’s already old news. 

How I first reacted to LLMs

Before I talk about how overwhelmed I feel about the amount of learning I had to do, I’ll have to go back to the past a bit.

When AI first landed, and I saw what ChatGPT could do, my heart sank. I knew that the content profession would change yet again. It was particularly discouraging  back then because I was just getting my feet steady as a technical writer. Although I was pretty confident my profession would never disappear, I knew that the road ahead will be tough for us.

When ChatGPT debuted in 2022, I didn’t understand how the tech worked and was resentful. I wasn’t upset that writers’ work was “stolen”, per se. I was more upset that the tech was mostly locked behind paywalls. As these services are in US dollars, that meant Global South knowledge workers with weaker currencies (like me) were at a serious disadvantage.

Fortunately, the DeepSeek moment happened, and now open source LLMs and coding agents are giving Global South folks a fairer shot at development and modernization. That’s why I’m pretty grateful to DeepSeek! (It remains the primary LLM model I use.)

The Deepseek moment melted away my resentment and I immediately got to learn how to use AI. Fast.

It was a huge learning curve. Fortunately, I’m a tech nerd who loves playing around with software, and have a natural inclination for it. After all, I write software technical documentation and blog posts about tech services such as app rationalisations, data centre to cloud migrations and more. New tech is exciting to me.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for all writers.

A merciless time: Anti-AI writers will be left behind

Writers have not been exactly receptive about AI tech; the creative writing communities are especially hostile about AI use in writing workflows. (Each time I write about my experiments with AI in my fiction writing, I inevitably get aggressive hate-filled comments.)

It’s not just about generating copy; some don’t even want you to use AI to edit the copy, which is ironic since tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid have been using it pretty actively.

For those of us working in the professional content space, we don’t have the luxury to ignore AI or write Substack essays about why we hate it. It’s either learn the skills or be left behind by your colleagues who are ahead of you in AI skills.

I’ve been a professional writer since the 1990s when I was stringing for the national newspaper and writing ad copy for advertising agencies, “faxing” it to them via a clunky, beeping fax modem. When I started as a journalist, my newsroom had only ONE Internet-connected computer. Years later, every computer was connected to the ‘net.

After being a journalist from 2000-2018 (with a break of a few years  in between when I had fantasies of being a nurse), I transitioned to the corporate world, working in corporate and government communications, wrestling with content strategy in a world where one wrong word on social media could make your day hell as a PR exec. Finally, I moved on the tech world where I’ve honed my skills as a technical communicator.

This is my long-ass way of saying that I’ve been in the trenches for decades and have seen the industry evolve with every tech wave.

Having lived through the journalism profession’s collapse thanks to the Internet,  this is not my first rodeo with technology upending my profession.

AI has evolved so much and so quickly beyond ChatGPT’s debut. Now, it’s not about writing the best prompts anymore. Sure it’s still important, but we’ve entered the agentic era where the “AI native” is an orchestrator of agents. Meaning, people are now increasingly managers of “talent”. However, instead of a team of people beneath you, you now manage a team of AI agents. Your work is as good as the AI agents you build.

Many writers in the creative field—the novelists, the ones hoping for a traditional publishing deal—are still stuck with the notion that AI is a chatbot and people use it to generate whole novels with a click. They don’t realize that AI has moved way beyond that.

They don’t realize how much they’re being left behind. AI-fluent writers are freely sharing their knowledge online. But many prefer not to due to the harassment they get from anti-AI writers.

Instead of learning from the AI-fluent writers, the anti-AI writers prefer to insult them in the comments section instead.

I suppose the only saving grace for these writers is that most  are not corporate writers but write fiction etc. So, the consequences would not be as severe for their career growth. I hope?

This season, the new skill professional content folks like me have to learn is context engineering and content engineering.

For content professionals, our growth is dependent on how fast we can learn and adapt.

But not every writer can learn AI tech quickly.

I’ve spoken to writers who blank out the moment I say “instance” or “markdown”. Heck, I’m still trying to convince most of them to build their own websites, but many reply that they prefer to use Substack or Facebook because it’s easier. So, what more using LLMs to improve their productivity?

But I get it. The speed of change is exhausting! I’m struggling myself, and I consider myself a fast learner.

Learning fast, learning messily

When I got over my resentment of LLMs, I quickly started experimenting with the tools and learning concepts. First with chatbots, then with coding agents and IDEs. I kept a prompt library, then built AI workflows, continuing to tweak them when they spat out disastrous output. I read use cases from those generous enough to document them online and tried to replicate what they did.

There was no teacher, no guide. I only had my learning abilities. Fortunately, having transitioned from journalism to content strategy and then technical writing and UX copywriting with YouTube videos, blog posts, books and quick-and-dirty experiments, I’ve had a lot of practice cobbling together a curriculum.

The fortunate thing about our age is that free content is everywhere. Yes, some content creators will tease you that they will teach you everything about AI only to gate their most important resource behind a $1000 course. Fortunately, we have many who are willingly putting out content that could power a course freely on YouTube and in their blogs. If you’re good with research, you can dig out many free resources on the Internet. On top of that, Big Tech, eager for more people to use their tools, are putting out valuable courses – often free. Take them.

So, that’s how I’ve been learning. From content creators on YouTube or blog spaces, from  Google and Anthropic courses. By running clumsy experiments.

However, lately, all this seems not enough.

Perhaps it’s due to my flagging energy levels due to a health issues a few months ago. Perhaps it’s  due to getting the hate, vitriol and blather from other writers as I try to document my learning journey. Perhaps it’s an accumulation of all this and managing the increasing expectations that I can 10x  my content workflows. (It’s still unrealistic; people need to understand how much human involvement is crucial in content creation. “Human taste” is hard to replicate with AI.)

The truth is, I’m tired, I need a break, but the AI companies are not giving me one and neither is the marketplace, whose expectations of its workers are rising by the day.

So, yes, when I had that conversation with Fabrizio, I was burned out having to juggle all of this. Fabrizio wanted me to turn my whiny journal entry into a blog post, and I told him I definitely would but I wanted to sit with it so that the blog post won’t turn out to be a mere rant and my version of old content writer yelling at the clouds.

I wanted this post to be a letter of sorts to my fellow  professional writers out there—I see you, I get what you’re going through. It’s bloody tough, but somehow we will get through this. I will try to help as best as I can.

As for me, I don’t want to just continue the way I am at hyperspeeds, burning myself out. What I need is a better learning strategy and a better way to manage my stress levels.

My realization: Learning needs to be more focused and deliberate

A while back I read a story about this software engineer who told his wife  that he needed her to take care of the kids and do all the housework so that he can focus on being an AI native in his tech company.

In an industry where software engineers are being laid off almost every day, I can almost hear the desperation in his voice even if the feminist in me wants to throw up in a corner at the sacrifice he’s asking of his wife.

Anyway, the man would he would spend hours at night right after work studying and running projects with AI.

Fortunately, he managed to become one of the few AI natives in his company. Whether he has gone back to doing his share of childcare is debatable, however.

Unfortunately for me, I do not have a hubby to ask this favour, so I have to make do. 

But, it got me thinking—what am I wasting time on that I could use to learn the skills I need to be AI native?

Unlike SWEs, I don’t have the technological foundation in programming to give me a leg up. So, my learning curve is much higher. On top of that, most of the videos and resources about AI are targeted at software engineers.

This meant that I needed to adapt materials to my use case.

The one thing I realised was that I needed to be stricter with my consumption of information. What’s the point of listening to YouTubers and podcasters who constantly hype up or rant about the newest AI models (especially since it does nothing for writing), latest controversy/scandal or Big Tech “sin”? 

So I need to trim out this unhelpful (albeit extremely entertaining) content, because that hour of listening could be used to learn the latest skill.

Another thing: I’ve been learning “between the cracks of life”. For example, watching a YouTube video while on the train, while wolfing down lunch or as I nod off to sleep.

As a result, I’ve not systematically documented what I’ve learned nor do I have a proper strategy in studying or retaining the knowledge. Which means constantly forgetting what I’ve learned and losing precious resources.

So, that meant:
a) scheduling deliberate blocks of time to learn, perhaps during the weekends b) a systematic way of documenting what I learned.

There’s also the added layer of “advertising” yourself as an AI native. Sure, you can build agentic workflows for content, but do people know about it? Writers are often icky about self promotion, but in our age I think it’s not just smart but unavoidable. The loudest gets noticed. The loudest gets the jobs.

It’s a LOT.

If SWEs are overwhelmed, imagine us content professionals whose resources are thin and often gated behind expensive courses.

My next action steps:

1. Stop consuming unhelpful (and toxic) content about AI.
2. Schedule a block of time during the weekend to learn a specific skill.
3. Document what I learn in Obsidian.
4. Build more AI projects.
5. Learn in public by teaching others what I’ve learned. (It’s the best way to bake the learning in your brain, and it’s a way of giving back to the community.)
6. Start owning the content engineer label because by golly I’m already doing the work of a semi-AI engineer might as well call myself.

If you’re a content professional, how are you managing your work and upskilling efforts in the age of AI?

PS: I call myself techwriter because yes, while I’m currently doing lots of content engineering stuff, I also write about software, technical concepts and create documentation. Due to my years in the communications field, I have written UX copy, press releases, white papers, technical documentation, content marketing pieces and brand stories. Uh, basically I write anything and everything. (My portfolio.)

I somewhat agree, but I'm still a sucker for non-fiction books. If a book is really good, it can provide you not just the required context and some knowledge of a given field, but also leave you with a few words of wisdom that can inspire you.

Also, I recommend everyone to follow what's cooking in /r/singularity

"Books and courses are traditional ways of learning. For senior tech writers, traditional learning won’t do. We’re living in the middle of a small technological revolution: new AI models, tools, and theories surface every week. Buying a book about anything that isn’t timeless theory or an established classic is now like buying an old newspaper: useful mainly as a historical record. Instead, stay abreast of tech news, because that’s the only thing that provides a return.

Staying up-to-date is not limited to reading Hacker News or Simon Willison’s blog: there’s also a very important social aspect to it. Join meetups in your area and enter Slack or Discord communities to replace the watercooler convos you had at work. Absorb trends, podcasts, worries, and jargon. It’s like moving to a new country: exhausting, but also exciting. In my case, I follow threads in several Slack communities where I can get a first-hand feeling of what’s cooking.

There are exceptions, of course. Books like the one CT Smith is writing, which focuses on how to sell technical writing to startup founders, are the right kind of material for this age. I, too, think that software is becoming marketing: as software becomes abundant, coding skills matter less than reputation and positioning. Docs are a service, not a deliverable: learn how to make the case for it. If you’re not a beginner, the only kind of books worth reading are the ones that teach you how to think and sell, not how to do the actual work. You already know the craft."

https://passo.uno/job-hunt-tech-writers-ai/

#TechnicalWriting #Documentation #AI #SoftwareDocumentation #ContentEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

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