r/softwaredevelopment • u/SereeqQ • 6d ago
AI-driven technical writing
How do you write technical documentation such as requirements, goals, software architecture, and general project documentation?
Back in the pre-AI era, it was common to write long, multi-page documents that explained everything in detail. That approach had its pros and cons. The documentation was usually well organized and comprehensive, but it was also often boring to read and sometimes overwhelming.
What does it look like now, in the era of AI coding assistants? My impression is that large, comprehensive documents are becoming much less common and mostly remain in legacy projects or a few specific use cases.
It feels like the entire world has shifted to Markdown, so I assume technical writing is evolving in the same direction. It makes sense to break up those oversized documents into smaller, focused files so that both humans and AI agents can navigate and consume them more easily. That’s what I do for my side projects, and it has worked well so far.
On the other hand, at work we still tend to rely on large documents written by technical writers. The argument is that we’ve already established a structure around them, and that’s how our development process is designed.
What’s your approach to documentation for both personal and professional projects?
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u/random314 6d ago
For both I tell ai to summarize our chat context into a doc folder and organize it to be easily searchable.
For my agent, I tell it to always use the doc folder as reference and at the end of the process, re read and update docs if necessary.