I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

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.

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,...

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.

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 dilemmas we face working in tech, whether the parallels between social media and AI hold up, the Streisand effect of Meta's attempt to suppress the book, and more. This post also includes discussion questions, key themes, and a full transcript.

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 engineers, the increasing necessity of systems thinking, the economic paradox where high tech valuations are contrasting with stagnant hiring, the risk of the Reverse Centaur dynamic (where humans merely approve AI output), and the growing value of authentic human connection and humanity.

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 the incomprehensibility of divine will, transhumanism and resurrection, predictive algorithms and free will, and more. This post also provides discussion questions, a transcript, and other resources.

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 doc-related projects and experiments, and how she balances a tech writing career with an intentionally offline life in rural Tennessee. We also get into reading habits, the fear of skill atrophy from AI reliance, and where the tech writer role might be headed.

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. This post also provides discussion questions, a transcript, and terms and definitions from the book.

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 dilemmas of labeling AI usage, why AI needs a good base of existing docs to function well, and how technical writers can stop doing plumbing work and start focusing on more high-value strategic initiatives instead (efforts that might push the limits of what AI can even do). This post also contains a lot of short...

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, algorithms, doomerism, stories and lists, democracy, printing press, alignment, dictator's dilemma, and more. This post also provides discussion questions, a transcript, and terms and definitions from the book.