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This is a recording of our <a href='/ai-book-club'>AI Book Club</a> discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593654498'><i>The MANIAC</i></a> by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78 as a case for human unpredictability,
In this podcast, co-host <a href='https://passo.uno'>Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti</a> and I chat with <a href='https://sdeaton.com'>Sarah Deaton</a>, a technical writer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code docs, about what documentation work looks like when much of it is automated. We discuss orchestrating docs through skills and agents rather than writing them, mining AI assistant conversations for doc gaps, running forensics on every false claim that reaches the docs, new metrics like time-to-correction and steers per PR, the fences that keep AI-generated docs honest, and how she closed mor
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's <i><a href='https://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Machine-Hassabis-DeepMind-Superintelligence/dp/0735222521'>The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence</a></i>. 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 grow
In this podcast, I chat with <a href='https://passo.uno'>Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti</a> 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.
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's <i><a href='https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101946598'>Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence</a></i>. 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 cybersecur
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Dan Wang's <i><a href='https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324106034'>Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future</a></i>. 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 me
In this podcast, I chat with <a href='https://mcnuggies.dev'>Larah Vasquez</a> and <a href='https://passo.uno/'>Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti</a> 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
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 <i>augments</i> 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.
In this podcast, I chat with two professors — <a href='https://www.linkedin.com/in/nupoorranade/'>Nupoor Ranade</a> (Carnegie Mellon) and <a href='https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymerritt/'>Jeremy Merritt</a> (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
This is a recording of our <a href='/ai-book-club'>AI Book Club</a> discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640'><i>If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Will Kill Us All</i></a> 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 recursi
In this podcast, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti (<a href='https://passo.uno'>passo.uno</a>) and I chat with Manny Silva (<a href='https://instructionmanuel.com'>instructionmanuel.com</a>), head of documentation at Skyflow and author of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Docs-Tests-Resilient-Technical-Documentation/dp/0994169361'>Docs as Tests</a>. 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 <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Tale-Power-Idealism/dp/1250391237'><i>Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism</i></a> 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
In this episode, Fabrizio and I discuss our predictions for tech comm in 2026, focusing on two posts: Fabrizio's <a href='https://passo.uno/my-day-tech-writer-2030/'>My day as an augmented technical writer in 2030</a> and my <a href='/blog/tech-comm-predictions-for-2026'>12 predictions for tech comm in 2026</a>. 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 mer
This post provides a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/God-Human-Animal-Machine-Technology/dp/0525562710'><i>God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning</i></a> 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 (<a href='https://passo.uno'>passo.uno</a>) and I talk with CT Smith, who writes on a blog at <a href='https://docsgoblin.com'>docsgoblin.com</a> 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 wr
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Co-Intelligence-Living-Working-Ethan-Mollick/dp/059371671X'><i>Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI</i></a> 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 <a href='https://passo.uno'>passo.uno</a>) and I discuss the concept of documentation theater with auto-generated wikis, why visual IDEs like <a href='https://antigravity.google/'>Antigravity</a> 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 <i>plumbing</i> work and start focusing on more high-value strategic initiatives instead (efforts
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Nexus-Brief-History-Information-Networks/dp/059373422X/'><i>Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI</i></a> 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 t
In this podcast episode, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with guest Anandi Knuppel about MCP servers and the role that technical writers can play in shaping AI capabilities and outcomes. Anandi shares insights on how writers can optimize documentation for LLM performance and expands on opportunities to collaborate with developers around AI tools. Our discussion also touches on ways to automate style consistency in docs, and the future directions of technical writing given the abundance of AI tools, MCP servers, and the central role that language plays in it all.
This is a recording of our AI book club discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Large-Language-Models-Understanding/dp/1098150961'>Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation</a> by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst, held Oct 19, 2025. The book differs from other books in the series in that it's a more technical exploration of how LLMs work, without any ethics discussions. It's less narrative and more engineering-oriented. Our discussion focuses on understanding of conceptual details and whether, to use an analogy, understanding the plane's engine helps
In this conversational podcast, Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti (<a href='https://passo.uno'>Passo.uno</a>) and I talk about the impact of AI on the technical writing profession. We tackle the anxiety, seen and felt almost everywhere, but especially on Reddit, within the community about job security and analyze the evolution of the technical writer's role into a more strategic context curator or content director. We also cover practical applications of AI, such as using agents markdown files to guide language models (with style overrides or API reference contexts), and the role documentation plays in
This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion about Karen Hao's <i>Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI</i>. The discussion is an informal, casual discussion with about half a dozen people online through Google Meet. You can also read a transcript and other details about the book here.
This is a recording of our <a href='/ai-book-club'>AI Book Club</a> session discussing Kai-Fu Lee's <a href='https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley/dp/132854639X'><i>AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order</i></a>. There are 4 people in this book club discussion, and our conversation focuses on the emerging AI duopoly between the US and China. We share our own US-centric blind spots and weigh the political and cultural implications of China potentially winning the AI race. We also talk about Kai-Fu Lee's prediction of mass job displacement and his pro
In this podcast, I chat with Fabrice Lacroix, founder of Fluid Topics, about the evolution of technical communication. Fabrice describes the industry's progression from (1) delivering static, monolithic PDFs to (2) using Content Delivery Platforms (CDPs) that provide dynamic, topic-based information directly to users to (3) developing content not just for human consumption, but for AI agents that will use this knowledge to automate complex tasks and workflows.
This is a recording of our <a href='/ai-book-club'>AI Book Club</a> session discussing Ray Kurzweil's <a href='https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Nearer-When-We-Merge/dp/1847928307'><i>The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI</i></a>. You can watch the recording on YouTube, listen to the audio file, read some summary notes, browse discussion questions, and even listen to a NotebookLM podcast (based on the summary). There are 5 people in this book club discussion, and we focus a lot on the topics of acceleration, especially as we see it happening in the workplace. We also weigh in on Ku
