The Role of AI in Technical Writing

Since ChatGPT was released, people have become more interested in artificial intelligence (AI). Many of us have come across articles with titles like "Top 10 ChatGPT Prompts," "How to Become a Prompt Engineer," and "Novel AI Prompts to Use." Many people believe that developers are the primary users of AI, but this is not always the case.

Technical writers write technical tutorial guides, whitepapers, software documentation, comparison articles, and more. They put their tech knowledge to use by writing articles that help others understand and use technology. It's important not to confuse technical writers with article writers, because they have different skill sets and roles.

This article will demonstrate how AI and technical writing go hand-in-hand, as well as introduce a helpful AI-powered tool for both writers and readers.

Benefits of AI for Technical Writing

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help technical writers be more productive and produce higher-quality work.

Here are some benefits of AI in technical writing:

Automate Repeated Tasks

AI can automate routine tasks such as checking for spelling and grammar errors, formatting, and ensuring the content is readable. This lets technical writers focus more on creating the content than editing it.

Enhanced Collaboration

AI enhances collaboration by improving communication between technical writers and other teammates within a project. This helps the technical writer create accurate content rather than an inaccurate but high-quality article.

Improving Content Quality

AI helps improve the quality of content or articles by identifying errors and gaps to ensure the article is within the style guides. Also, Natural Language Processing (NLP) in many AI tools helps ensure that documentation is written concisely and clearly to fit the user's expectations and search patterns.

Improves Accessibility

AI in technical writing helps authors create documentation or articles that are more accessible to users with disabilities. This includes adding key features like alt text generation for images.

Improves Translation and Accessibility

AI helps improve accessibility by translating content into multiple languages so those who do not understand English can understand the article or documentation accurately and easily. This is helpful if the content is for a global software with a global software.

Benefits of Pieces for Technical Writers

Before we dive into the benefits of Pieces as an AI tool for technical writing, let’s take a moment to define what Pieces is and understand its use cases.

What is Pieces?

Pieces is an AI developer tool that saves code snippets and provides technical writers with clear documentation of codebases. The software allows developers to store, organize, and share code snippets. In addition to code snippet management, Pieces Copilot can generate personalized code based on your unique project context, give you AI-generated summaries of your conversations, and supports cloud, local, and custom LLMs.

This is not just limited to developers or folks who code.

Pieces can also be of great use to technical writers as it creates a centralized storage for code snippets. Here are some advantages of using Pieces as a technical writer:

1. Code Organization

As stated earlier, Pieces creates a storage or a personal repository of all your saved code snippets. This makes it easy for you, as a technical writer or docs engineer, to access the codes easily in an organized manner.

2. Enhanced Collaboration

The main aim of Pieces is to save code snippets to enhance or improve collaboration within a team or when working on side projects. As a technical writer, you deal with code almost as often as a software developer does, and when you face bugs or errors, you need some debugging.

Your snippets can be shared with Pieces Shareable Links that let you save and share the code and its context with whomever you need. This way, you can debug easily, and within your articles, you can use the links there to make code more accessible to your readers.

One beauty of using the software is that it alerts you when a snippet contains sensitive information, so you don’t accidentally share it.

3. Improves Documentation

As you already know, Pieces is a centralized storage of code snippets. As a technical writer, you can use this by having organized documentation for your snippets.

Every saved code snippet is automatically saved with contextual information.

This contextual information includes related links, tags, annotations, descriptions, etc., of the snippet to give more information on what the snippet is trying to achieve.

This improves reader accessibility in an article, as readers get more information on the code snippets, similar to a How-To guide.

Benefits of Pieces for Technical Readers

In the previous section, we explored how Pieces can help technical writers. But did you know that Pieces can also be useful for technical readers? Let's discuss!

Technical readers want to read articles and documentation with ease. The readability of an article is essential because if it is not readable or accessible, the reader will struggle to understand the content.

Pieces Copilot

Pieces Copilot is an AI tool that helps technical readers understand the context of code snippets by asking technical questions. It works entirely within your browser, so you don't have to leave the page to ask questions.

To use copilot, simply install a Pieces for Developers browser extension. Then, hover over the code snippet you want to understand. Click on the Pieces “Ask Copilot” icon to start a conversation.

You can also ask questions by clicking the browser extension icon on your toolbar. The Pieces Copilot will then provide you with an answer and any relevant documentation or resources.

Pieces Copilot is a great way to quickly and easily understand code snippets. It's perfect for technical readers who need to understand code without spending hours poring over documentation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Pieces for Developers are helpful for both technical writers and readers. AI in technical writing helps authors organize code snippets into personal repositories, assists technical readers by automatically associating relevant context to code snippets, and much more.

These features can help technical writers be more productive and efficient by accelerating note-taking, automatically organizing writing materials, and enabling faster searching and sharing.

If you’re new to Pieces, download the Pieces for Developers Desktop App and the Pieces Web Extension and get started!