I have been seeing posts from folks about Snowflake laying off its entire tech writing team. This is an absolutely bonkers decision for any org to be making today.
Your technical writing team is how you ensure that people can discover and learn your products. And the content flows across many systems.
It’s not just humans reading the docs, and hasn’t been for years. Model providers crawl docs to train their models on your products. Coding agents refer to your docs in-process to perform coding-related tasks for developers. Documentation is an essential resource for all of these systems.
Forward-thinking orgs understand this and have been building feedback loops to evaluate how well these systems understand products from the docs, and make targeted updates to docs to improve how the information flows across these systems. Docs are more important than they were when it was just humans reading them, not less. Humans could adapt to poor documention and sometimes succeed in spite of it. Today’s systems can not.
Any company that cuts its entire documentation team is telling me it does not understand how product discoverability and agent-first developer workflows work in today’s world. It is telling me that I should switch to a company that understands these things because my tools need high-quality, well-maintained documentation to succeed at the tasks I need to achieve.