PODCAST · technology
I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast
by Tom Johnson
Topics and issues for technical writers. Improve your technical communication role. Empower users with better documentation.
Episodes
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AI Book Club recording of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, by Katrina Manson
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....
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Why docs still need an owner — podcast with CT Smith about WTFM
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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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Will tech writers survive AI? Perspectives from two professors, Nupoor Ranade and Jeremy Merritt
In this podcast, I chat with two professors — Nupoor Ranade (Carnegie Mellon) and Jeremy Merritt (James Madison University) — about how AI is reshaping the technical writing profession from the academic side. We discuss dropping enrollments, misconceptions about what tech writers do,...
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AI Book Club recording of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies'
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Will Kill Us All by Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, held March 15, 2026. Our discussion touches on a variety of topics, including whether the book's use of parables strengthens or…
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Podcast: Doc testing, skills files, and the guardians of knowledge -- with Manny Silva
In this podcast, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti (passo.uno) and I chat with Manny Silva (instructionmanuel.com), head of documentation at Skyflow and author of Docs as Tests. Manny is working on a follow-up book that incorporates AI, covering validated generation, trusted agents, and self-healing...
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AI Book Club recording, notes, and transcript for Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, held February 15, 2026. Our discussion touches on a variety of topics, including whether criticisms of the author's complicity are fair, the ethical...
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Podcast: Tech comm predictions for 2026 (Phase One)
In this episode, Fabrizio and I discuss our predictions for tech comm in 2026, focusing on two posts: Fabrizio's My day as an augmented technical writer in 2030 and my 12 predictions for tech comm in 2026. Some of the specific topics we cover include the evolution of writers into automation...
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AI Book Club recording of God, Human, Animal, Machine
This post provides a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn, held Jan 18, 2026. Our discussion touches upon a variety of parallels between religion and AI, such as the black box nature of AI and...
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Podcast: Writing as telepathy: AI tools, automation, and an intentionally offline life -- conversation with CT Smith
In this episode, Fabrizio (passo.uno) and I talk with CT Smith, who writes on a blog at docsgoblin.com and works as a documentation lead for Payabli. Our conversation covers how CT uses AI tools like Claude in her documentation workflow, why she builds tooling that doesn't depend on AI, her many...
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AI Book Club recording, notes, and transcript for Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick, held Dec 14, 2025. Our discussion touches upon a variety of topics, including the educator's lens, cautious optimism, the jagged frontier, personas, pedagogy, takeaways, and more....
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Documentation theater and the acceleration paradox -- podcast episode 3 with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
In this episode, Fabrizio (from passo.uno) and I discuss the concept of documentation theater with auto-generated wikis, why visual IDEs like Antigravity beat CLIs for writing, and the liberation vs. acceleration paradox where AI speeds up work but creates review bottlenecks. We also explore the...
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Recording, transcript, and notes for AI Book Club discussion of Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari, held Nov 16, 2025. Our discussion touches upon a variety of topics, including self-correcting mechanisms, alien intelligence, corporate surveillance,...
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MCP servers and the role tech writers can play in shaping AI capabilities and outcomes -- podcast with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and Anandi Knuppel
In this podcast episode, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with guest Anandi Knuppel about MCP servers and the role that technical writers can play in shaping AI capabilities and outcomes. Anandi shares insights on how writers can optimize documentation for LLM performance and expands on...
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Recording of AI book club session of 'Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation', by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst
This is a recording of our AI book club discussion of Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst, held Oct 19, 2025. The book differs from other books in the series in that it's a more technical exploration of how LLMs work…
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Podcast: How AI is changing the role of technical writers to context curators and content directors
In this conversational podcast, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti (Passo.uno) and I talk about the impact of AI on the technical writing profession. We tackle the anxiety, seen and felt almost everywhere, but especially on Reddit, within the community about job security and analyze the evolution of the...
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Recording of AI Book Club discussion of Karen Hao's Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion about Karen Hao's Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. The discussion is an informal, casual discussion with about half a dozen people online through Google Meet. You can also read a transcript and other details about the...
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Recording of AI Book Club discussion about Kai-fu Lee's AI Superpowers
This is a recording of our AI Book Club session discussing Kai-Fu Lee's AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. There are 4 people in this book club discussion, and our conversation focuses on the emerging AI duopoly between the US and China. We share our own US-centric...
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Will our next users be AI agents? The future of content delivery with Fabrice Lacroix, founder of Fluid Topics (podcast)
In this podcast, I chat with Fabrice Lacroix, founder of Fluid Topics, about the evolution of technical communication. Fabrice describes the industry's progression from (1) delivering static, monolithic PDFs to (2) using Content Delivery Platforms (CDPs) that provide dynamic, topic-based...
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AI Book Club recording and notes for The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil
This is a recording of our AI Book Club session discussing Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. You can watch the recording on YouTube, listen to the audio file, read some summary notes, browse discussion questions, and even listen to a NotebookLM podcast (based on the...
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Notes and discussion for Suleyman's <i>The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future</i> + AI Book Club recording and transcript
This post describes the key arguments and themes in The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman, for the AI Book Club: A Human in the Loop. This post not only breaks down the logic but also jumps off into some themes (beyond the book) that might be more tech-writer relevant,...
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Notes and discussion for John Warner's <i>More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI</i> + AI Book Club recording
This post has notes and questions for discussion for More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, published in February 2025 by John Warner. Warner's book, which explores what we lose when we outsource writing to AI, is the first book in the AI Book Club: A Human in the Loop.
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Rethinking traditional approaches to release notes -- recording of WTD Australia presentation
I gave a presentation to the Write the Docs Australia group on using AI to write release notes using file diffs, on Feb 16, 2025. Here's the recording, presentation description, and transcript.
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My 2025 trends predictions for tech comm
It's that time of year again when we take to analyzing trends. If you know me, you're probably gearing up for a load of AI-optimistic predictions because, as I've noted in previous posts like Unpacking the issues from AI, I'm an AI optimist. However, my AI optimism isn't based on hype or the...
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[Podcast] GenAI and Document360: Conversation with Saravana Kumar
This podcast explores GenAI in technical documentation scenarios, highlighting the AI features and capabilities provided in Document360. I talk with Saravana Kumar, CEO of Kovai.co, which makes Document360, about how AI is changing search functionality and reducing support costs in knowledge…
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Podcast: Task decomposition and complex tree diagrams
This tutorial will help you understand task decomposition by guiding you through the process of creating a complex tree diagram that's too sophisticated for an AI tool to create at once. Whether you're creating tree diagrams or not, it doesn't matter. This is just an example of how to break down...
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Podcast: Using long-token contexts to quality check an entire API doc set
One of the advantages of recent Gen AI updates is the massive token input context. When you can pass in an entire set of documentation as an input, you have a much stronger possibility for powerful prompts. In this tutorial, I share some quality-control prompts you can use that deal with entire…
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Podcast: Using file diffs for better release notes in reference docs
You can use AI prompts when creating release notes for APIs by leveraging file diffs from regenerated reference documentation. The file diffs from version control tools provide a reliable, precise information source about what's changed in the release.
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Podcast: Populating documentation templates using AI
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use AI to populate documentation templates with the source material you've gathered. For example, API overviews often follow a highly structured template. This technique can be a quick way to get an initial draft of documentation, which you can then edit and...
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Podcast: Gathering source material for context input
One of the most successful strategies for using AI is to pass in an abundance of source material that can augument and inform the AI's responses. In this tutorial, I cover strategies for gathering this material, including what types of documents to look for, optimal ordering, pitfalls to look out...
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Podcast: Creating high-fidelity, thematically organized notes from engineering meetings using AI
For AI tools to generate accurate information for documentation you're writing, you need to pass in source material. This usually means meeting with engineers and product managers to gather information about the product. In this tutorial, I share prompts for turning those meeting transcriptions...
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[Podcast] Uncovering and communicating the value of your tech comm teams' work, with Keren Brown
In this podcast episode, I talk with Keren Brown, VP of Marketing and Value at Zoomin Software, about strategies for technical writers to demonstrate their value within their organizations, especially in light of recent layoffs in the tech industry. We discuss aligning documentation work with...
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[Podcast] Breaking ground: New API documentation course at UW, with Bob Watson
In this podcast, I chat with Bob Watson about an upcoming API documentation course he'll be teaching at the University of Washington. Bob has extensive experience working as an API technical writer at big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The UW reached out to Bob to develop this...
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My 2024 technical writing trends and predictions
I've been mulling over whether to write a trends post this year. There's so much uncertainty, it's hard to feel confident about how the tech writing profession will play out. But little trends-related ideas keep surfacing in the back of my mind, so I decided to write out some of my thoughts.…
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Podcast: Notes and themes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
These are some notes and thoughts from reading Robert Pirsig's classic philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. My reading here focuses more on the technical writing aspects and themes from the book. Some themes include Classic versus Romantic modes of...
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Webinar recording: Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective
I recently gave a webinar titled 'Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective' on December 8, 2023. The webinar was sponsored by the STC Washington, DC - Baltimore Chapter. In this presentation, I shared some personal experiences in using AI for different writing-related use...
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30+ ways I’m using AI in everyday writing life as a technical writer, blogger, and curious human
In this post, I provide over 30 real-life examples of how I'm using AI on a daily basis, not just for technical writing tasks but more broadly in life, including summarizing content, explaining concepts, answering questions, troubleshooting problems, and having engaging conversations for a…
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Podcast: The evolution of podcasting, with Ed Marsh
In this podcast, I talk with Ed Marsh about podcasting. You may have listened to Ed Marsh's Content Content podcast previously. As an experienced podcaster, Ed has a lot of insights and thoughts about podcasting. We discuss what initially drew him to start podcasting, the equipment and logistics...
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Podcast: Tech writing and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with Dan Grabski
In this episode, I chat with Dan Grabski, a senior content developer based in Portland, both about his recent WTD talk titled 'Zen and the Art of Manually Creating API Documentation' and Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' Dan explains the importance of focusing not just…
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Doing research with AI tools -- avoiding the trap of fabricated URLs
In this short podcast, I explore using AI tools to do research, the potential for fake URLs, and how to deal with the fabrication. I started by using Claude to summarize a podcast and provide a list of salient points, including the potential counterargument. What I didn't expect was for Claude to...
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Notes for Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality
In Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett describe how the Dutch achieved so much cycling success, and how other cities might do the same. The authors bring up a variety of techniques and approaches the Dutch have used, such as seamlessly...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Topics and issues for technical writers. Improve your technical communication role. Empower users with better documentation.
HOSTED BY
Tom Johnson
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast have?
I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast currently has 347 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast about?
Topics and issues for technical writers. Improve your technical communication role. Empower users with better documentation.
How often does I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast release new episodes?
I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast publishes regularly with 347 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast?
I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast is created and hosted by Tom Johnson.
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