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  • Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop

    Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop
    May 31 2026
    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.
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    58 Min.
  • AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark

    AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark
    May 17 2026
    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.
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    57 Min.
  • AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang

    AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang
    Apr 23 2026
    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...
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    59 Min.
  • Podcast: How valuable are agent skills? Conversation with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti

    Podcast: How valuable are agent skills? Conversation with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
    Apr 12 2026
    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.
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    1 Std. und 5 Min.
  • The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI

    The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI
    Apr 5 2026
    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.
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    1 Std. und 29 Min.
  • Will tech writers survive AI? Perspectives from two professors, Nupoor Ranade and Jeremy Merritt

    Will tech writers survive AI? Perspectives from two professors, Nupoor Ranade and Jeremy Merritt
    Mar 21 2026
    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.
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    1 Std. und 18 Min.
  • AI Book Club recording of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies'

    AI Book Club recording of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies'
    Mar 17 2026
    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,...
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    56 Min.
  • Podcast: Doc testing, skills files, and the guardians of knowledge -- with Manny Silva

    Podcast: Doc testing, skills files, and the guardians of knowledge -- with Manny Silva
    Mar 8 2026
    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.
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    1 Std.