Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Most documentation teams are aiming at the wrong target. They think their job is to produce documents. I don’t think that anymore. I think the real job is to capture, curate, structure, and maintain truth so machines can generate documents as needed. That is a very different role, and it is a much more durable one.

For years, documentation was treated as a downstream function. Product decided, engineering built, marketing positioned, and documentation turned all of that into manuals, guides, white papers, and release content. In that model, the document was the product. That model is already breaking down.

AI is getting very good at producing coherent, structured, usable prose. It can generate summaries, guides, overviews, draft white papers, first-pass technical documentation, and marketing collateral faster than any human team. Anyone pretending otherwise is arguing with the direction of the market. The uncomfortable truth is simple: if your value is typing the final document, that value is going to compress quickly.

The teams that cling to the old model will not be protected by sentiment, tradition, or craft. They will be bypassed. That may sound harsh, but it is just the normal pattern of technological change. Society does not preserve roles because people are attached to them. Technology automates what can be automated, and the people who adapt move up the stack while the people who do not get left behind. Several times in my career I’ve worked with amazing people who were very, very good at their job – and then, that job simply evaporated. As a leader, my goal is to protect both the business and my talent from falling into that trap.

We have seen this movie before across manufacturing, operations, software development, and analyst work. Every time, repetitive production work was absorbed by tooling, and the human role shifted toward judgment, control, and higher-order decision-making. Documentation is not exempt from that pattern just because people happen to like writing.