Why AI struggles with institutional debt in technical documentation

Short summary

The author pushes back against the claim that AI can replace technical writers, arguing that documentation is about capturing institutional debt—unwritten tribal knowledge that lives in developers' heads. AI can describe what code does but cannot uncover why a legacy bug crashes the API every Sunday or extract context from tired engineers. When senior devs leave, human writers can interview and preserve that knowledge; AI cannot.

• •AI can describe code syntax but misses unwritten institutional knowledge
• •Technical writing is detective work extracting tribal knowledge from engineers
• •Replacing writers with AI risks losing undocumented context when senior devs leave

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