I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

Hosted by Tom Johnson

Technology Education News

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Episodes

347

Latest episode

Sep 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

A technical writing podcast about the latest trends and practices in the field of technical communication. Technical communication includes topics like technical writing (software help), AI, information architecture, usability, API documentation, information design, web design, illustration, DITA, structured authoring, content strategy, visual communication, and more. If you're a technical writer or interested in technical writing, this is the one of few podcasts in this niche. I also have a blog at https://idratherbewriting.com where the podcasts and other blog topics are published. For an index of all podcasts, see https://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

September 20, 202634 min

AI Book Club recording: I Am Not a Robot by Joanna Stern

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...

September 2, 202653 min

Writing for an audience of agents — podcast with Ethan Palm from Mintlify

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.

August 16, 202658 min

AI Book Club recording of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78 as a case for human unpredictability, the garage door scene as a metaphor for...

August 2, 20261 hr 7 min

Orchestrating docs instead of writing them yourself — podcast with Sarah Deaton of Anthropic

In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Sarah Deaton, a technical writer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code docs, about what documentation work looks like when much of it is automated. We discuss orchestrating docs through skills and agents rather than writing them, mining AI assistant conversations for doc gaps, running forensics on every false claim that reaches the docs, new metrics like time-to-correction and steers per PR, the fences that keep AI-generated docs honest, and how she closed more than a hundred pull requests in a single day.

June 28, 202658 min

AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. In the discussion, we talk about the complex character of Demis Hassabis (and comparisons to Ender's game), the idea of founders' personal morality acting as a final safeguard, and the relentless acceleration of AI development. We also talk about the historical rivalries between deep learning and reinforcement learning, the growing urgency around AI-driven job displacement, and what it means to train AI to automate our own work.

May 31, 202657 min

Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop -- podcast with Fabrizio

In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about a variety of topics related to AI and docs, such as applying Italo Calvino's literary principles of lightness and quickness to evaluate docs, the reality of AI review fatigue versus creator fatigue, whether vibe-coded tools are tools slop, developing internal skills for repeatable doc processes, and the utility of running local AI models.

May 17, 202656 min

AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Our discussion explores Tegmark's visions of superintelligence, the unpredictability of AI goals and subgoals, and how the Asilomar principles fare against the relentless market pressures of today's AI arms race. We also contrast the book's theoretical focus on cosmic energy (and how superintelligence might more efficiently extract energy from matter) with the immediate, tangible threats AI poses to cybersecurity and global financial systems.

April 23, 202658 min

AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Our discussion tries to tie some of the book's themes to AI (to align with the book club's theme), but only in places where it makes sense. Some topics we discuss include social engineering, electric vehicles, contrasting energy infrastructures and the ability to power AI compute, mass surveillance networks, the differences between America's lawyerly society and China's engineering state. Fortunately, one of the book club members had recently been to China and could share firsthand experiences and impressions of cities...

April 12, 20261 hr 5 min

Podcast: How valuable are agent skills? Conversation with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti

In this podcast, I chat with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about using skills to extend AI capabilities, the future of agentic engineering, local models like Qwen and Gemma, and whether the tech writer role is shifting into automation architecture. We get into the memory problem in LLMs (and why some of us actually prefer the no memory to extended memory), the progression from prompt engineering to context engineering to compound engineering to orchestrating whole agent systems, and how skills are quietly forcing engineers to write down knowledge they'd never documented before.

April 5, 20261 hr 28 min

The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI

I recently gave a presentation to students and faculty in person at Louisiana Tech University on March 30, 2026, focusing on what I call the cyborg model of technical writing. The idea is that the emerging model for tech writing isn't one in which AI replaces tech writers but rather one in which AI augments tech writers. Tech writers interact with AI in a continuous back-and-forth, conversational, iterative manner. This post contains the recording, slides, transcript, summary, notes, and more from my presentation.

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