I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

In this podcast, I chat with Andrew Etter about his new book, Documentation at Scale: Best-in-class content for the AI era, the follow-up to his 2016 book Modern Technical Writing. We discuss why Markdown's simplicity still matters and what its variants have lost, why the case for a docs team rests on accountability rather than writing every word, a Slack bot that lets non-technical contributors open docs PRs, how AI shifts writers toward higher-level work, and where AI still falls short with tutorials and video.

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, held October 18, 2026. Ratings ranged from two stars to five, but most of the group agreed the book made AI warfare feel immediate rather than futuristic. We talk about how much of the kill chain is information work long before anyone fires a weapon, moral injury among remote operators, the habit of clicking allow on every permission prompt, who's to blame when an AI-identified target turns out to be a school, AI-driven...

In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with CT Smith about her new book, WTFM: A Practical Guide for Standing Up Docs at a Startup. We discuss why docs need a human owner even when anyone can generate content with AI, how CT kept her voice by writing the book herself in Neovim, the layered pipeline of Vale hooks, skills, model reviews, and sandbox fixtures that lets Claude Code handle about 40% of her tickets, the risk of gradual disempowerment, and why systems thinking matters most in a first docs hire.

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern, held September 20, 2026. The group gave the book its lowest ratings yet, and much of the discussion is about why: so many of the experiences come across as superficial stunts with AI, rather than true engagement. In our discussion, some found the medical chapter to be the book's strongest section. Other topics: the question of whether you should fix a system before amplifying it, chatbots that give you the candid career advice...

In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Ethan Palm, a technical writer and knowledge engineer at Mintlify, about what happens when nearly half your documentation traffic comes from AI agents. We discuss Mintlify's platform data on agent versus human traffic, hidden directories for agent-only content, the uncertain future of llms.txt, automated doc maintenance workflows where writing accounts for at most ten percent of the job, and the social atrophy that comes from reaching for a terminal prompt instead of a coworker.