I'd Rather Be Writing, by Tom Johnson

Tom's opinionated guide to skill building 101

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The thing I'm most excited about with AI lately is SKILLs. (I have to capitalize the word at first so you know I'm talking about agent skills rather than just general capabilities; however, I'll subsequently just refer to agent skills as skills.) I've now built about 10 skills for various purposes, and I'd like to write a post that shares some of my thoughts around skill building in a more opinionated way.

AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

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

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Review of Max Tegmark's 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence'

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

This post is my review of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0, a book we read in the AI Book Club. Tegmark, an MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute, says Life 1.0 relies entirely on biological evolution to change its hardware and software, Life 2.0 (humanity) can design its own software (through learning and culture) but is stuck with its evolved hardware, and Life 3.0 is a technological stage where life can design both its software and its physical hardware. Although Tegmark's book was published in 2017 (before ChatGPT), the book's core questions about recursive self-improvement, AI alignment, steering beneficial AI, etc., are still highly relevant today.

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

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Developing internal skills for recurring documentation processes like release notes

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

My hypothesis this year around AI was that if I develop some agent skills to speed up repeatable processes, it might clear up my bandwidth and free up time for me to work on non-repeatable doc tasks. It appears to be working.

Looking back at the AI Book Club one year in

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

On pace and value -- why is moving slow boring?

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Frenetic thinking

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Work expands to fill the space allotted

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Too much coffee?

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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 like Shenzhen and Beijing. Among many observations, she describes the tech fatigue of everyday life, where everything (even prices at stores) requires you to use an app.

Some thoughts after using AI to help with taxes

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

After receiving a letter from the IRS stating that I owed more taxes on a previous year, I used AI to identify the issue -- a missing cost basis on stock sales. I then successfully disputed the notice, and ultimately claimed a sizable refund by carrying over capital losses. AI tools like Claude and Gemini have become surprisingly capable at analyzing uploaded tax returns and guiding novices like me through complex scenarios.

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

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

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

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Will tech writers survive AI? Perspectives from two professors, Nupoor Ranade and Jeremy Merritt

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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, historical parallels to past disruptions, agentic AI and organizational restructuring, the cyborg model of human-machine collaboration, and how academics and practitioners can bridge the divide to solve real problems together.

AI Book Club recording of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies'

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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 weakens its argument, the question of whether AI can develop genuine intentions, the competitive dynamics that prevent any single company from pumping the brakes, the limits of recursive self-improvement, and what ordinary people should make of wildly conflicting predictions from leading AI thinkers. This post also includes discussion questions, key themes, and a full transcript.

Recording of Automation Engineering 101 for Tech Docs presentation at WTD West Coast Supermeetup

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I recently gave a presentation titled Automation Engineering 101 for Tech Docs at the Write the Docs West Coast Supermeetup. I was one of two presenters. The talk covers seven principles for designing repeatable doc processes that AI can execute, using release notes automation as a running example. This post has the recording, slides, transcript, and a narrative summary of the talk.

Cracking the code on corporate visibility

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800

If you create content and share it with people around you, whether it's blog posts and podcasts on the web, or educational offerings internally at your company, you become much more visible to those around you. That visibility can be helpful in opening doors and expanding opportunities.

Podcast: Doc testing, skills files, and the guardians of knowledge -- with Manny Silva

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800

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 documentation.