Welcome reader.
For a while now (er, years) I’ve been planning and then putting off adding a blog section to my personal portfolio site. And here we are! It only took the advent of AI coding agents coupled with a deep concern about the instability of the current job market to get me here!
I will spare you the post about my revamped personal portfolio that I vibe coded from a hand-coded HTML page to an Astro site. Suffice it to say that it took a couple iterations to land here on this simple yet new-to-me site.
The post content at the bottom of this page was authored by Claude as part of the initial site relaunch. It’s a little snarky, don’t you think?
It turns out even technical writers can have a hard time writing about themselves.
To be clear, I don’t have a hard time writing about myself, but I do have a busy life and family. I’ve returned to this post to share some thoughts about where we’re at, as of May 2026.
A tech writer’s role, what they do and how they work is all fundamentally changing due to the advent of the AI-first era. While the core of what technical writers do is the same, our roles are redefining themselves in real-time. We are still content sifters, technical detail detectives, user advocates, and crafters of words. We still (hopefully) care deeply about educating and enabling our audience to be successful in completing their jobs-to-be-done. We still love a good turn of phrase in a release note and a friendly tone in UI text. As our toolchains evolve to feature AI agents, what we do and what we oversee are starting to blend. Now every tech writer is a manager, but we are managing pipelines, AI agents, and content repositories.
There’s a great sense of excitement and possibility as we rethink the role and what to call it. But the loss is there. The grief for hand-crafted prose sits alongside our new AI-native fluency and tempers the enthusiasm. Many tech writers I know come from humanities backgrounds and value the power and process of the written word. They are novelists and songwriters when they’re not at their day jobs. Or they left journalism for a steadier paycheck, since their research and writing skills are uniquely sharp. These people value the Writer aspect of the Technical Writer title, and they are bravely adopting new ways of working while feeling a tinge of regret.
There’s also the gut-wrenching loss of multiple product documentation teams across a wave of industry layoffs. At my current company, we emphasize that content is AI infrastructure. We continue to hammer that point home. Although it’s very true, one can only hope that the message lands with decision makers. It will be interesting to see what happens to the companies who shred their technical content teams and then realize that AI agents are unable to make sense of their AI-generated content that got shipped with little-to-no review.
As I’ve written before, courage is a key defining trait of a tech writer. At this moment, we will dig deep into our courageous selves. We’ll continue to learn quickly, pivot to new working models, measure success, and produce positive outcomes for our readers.
Hang in there. While it’s a wild ride at this very moment, we’ll make it out to the other side with a new sense of who we are, how we work, and our place in the industry.
The content below was generated by AI as part of the portfolio vibe coding process. Take it how you will.
Hi! I’m Rachael, a technical writer and team manager. Welcome to the blog section of my portfolio — or at least, the placeholder version of it.
I’ll be honest: this post was drafted with a little AI assist. I asked it to help me ship something rather than stare at a blank page forever, and here we are. It turns out even technical writers can have a hard time writing about themselves.
What I can promise is that future posts will actually come from my own brain — thoughts on documentation craft, tools, content strategy, managing writing teams, and whatever else I find worth putting into words.
Until then, feel free to browse the portfolio. The work there is entirely mine, no AI required.