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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

I also disagree with the author.

The first careers I witnessed being negatively impacted by AI coming onto the scene .. just a couple years ago .. was tech writers. Source: my personal network of tech writer colleagues.

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Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.

My father knows a guy that financed a Texas mansion, for $2MM, using the collateral from his decade of running a very large technical document translation service (US resident, using foreign workforce from his homeland), popular throughout the 2010s.

Was a beautiful house, which I briefly lived in during scatterbrained renovations (never met the new owner).

The bank forclosed on his house ~late2024/early2025... anybody can now just use an LLM to translate (in real time), on sub-$300 hardware (offline, open-source models run via e.g: Whisper[GUI]).

Yeah not seeing it for technical writing. Especially in industries with even a hint of regulatory compliance, the imprecision is too significant. It's not for lack of trying or wishful thinking.

Either your colleagues are facing stiffer competition off-shore (not LLM driven) or their jobs were more about organizing, checking and sorting topics and data (LLMs can take that away)

As a tech writer myself, I often hear from other tech writers around the world that they find themselves as editors for llm-written slop. The main problem is that even before llns, almost no senior manager understood what the TWs actually do. As a result, there is a strong desire to get rid of the editor team.(see the case of Snowflake when a team of 70 documentarians was let go in a single day).

The company I work for also encourages us to use agents as much as possible. Now, I spend more time in the terminal than in VS Code. However, the situation is different for those who work in regulated areas.

tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.

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