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I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

By: Tom Johnson
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About this listen

 A technical writing podcast about the latest trends and practices in the field of technical communication. Technical communication includes topics like technical writing (software help), AI, information architecture, usability, API documentation, information design, web design, illustration, DITA, structured authoring, content strategy, visual communication, and more. If you're a technical writer or interested in technical writing, this is the one of few podcasts in this niche. I also have a blog at https://idratherbewriting.com where the podcasts and other blog topics are published. For an index of all podcasts, see https://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts.2023, I'd Rather Be Writing Education Politics & Government
Episodes
  • 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 26 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 mins
  • 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 hr and 5 mins
  • 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 hr and 29 mins
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