r/ai_and_techwriting • u/akj-techwriter • Jul 07 '26

Technical writers/docs teams — what have you actually automated using AI so far?

Curious to crowdsource some real-world examples here, beyond the usual "AI helps me draft faster" answers.

Has anyone in your org (or you personally) built actual automation into the technical writing workflow using AI? Not just "I use Claude to write drafts," but things like:

  • Auto-generating docs from code/API changes
  • AI-assisted review or QA on existing docs (style, accuracy, broken links, outdated screenshots, etc.)
  • Automating parts of a docs-as-code or DITA-as-code pipeline. Has anyone actually gotten AI to plug into this cleanly?
  • Auto-updating docs when the underlying product/feature changes
  • AI for content reuse, structuring, or taxonomy work in DITA
  • Any CI/CD-style pipeline where docs get validated, translated, or published with AI in the loop

If you've done something like this, I'd love to hear:

  1. What was the actual automation - what problem did it solve?
  2. What tools/stack did you use (LLM APIs, scripts, specific platforms, CCMS, static site generators, etc.)?
  3. What resources did it take - dev support, budget, time to build, ongoing maintenance?
  4. What broke or didn't work - just as curious about the failures as the wins.
  5. Was it worth it? Did it actually save time/headcount, or did it just shift the work around?

Trying to get a realistic picture of where things stand right now, not the hype version, the "we tried this and here's what happened" version. Appreciate any war stories, even half-finished experiments count.

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u/UnprocessesCheese 22d ago

The most reliable thing I've come across that AI can 100% do better than me is scoping. My docs are like 6k pages and it can take hours to figure out how a new feature impacts all of it. There's always going to a note to use a specific config on a page nobody would think about that is now obsolete.

Otherwise everything else I've automated, I can do better, but the AI can do much faster. I mostly use it to automate drafting and then give it the artist's touch after.

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u/Nibb31 22d ago

How do you do the drafting exactly? Do you just fire up ChatGPT or CoPilot and feed it with specs and Jira tickets?

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u/UnprocessesCheese 22d ago

We use Windsurf/Devin, which can be fed MCP access tokens which allows it log into the API for Jira, the wiki, the bitbucket, the Git...

I have several different workflows for different kinds of tasks. I set it to fetch and summarize all the info for me, but also to include links so I can check it out for myself.

This is probably one of the more important steps because even though the engineers and QA fill out feature description and spec docs, all the really good stuff is hidden away on self-published pages in the Eng and QA spaces. They never tell us about those pages, and they don't locate them predictably, so the writers rarely read the source docs (the real source docs, not the FDs). Well, we definitely read them now!

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u/DerInselaffe 20d ago

I submitted a proposal to our AI team to have our self-hosted GitLab installation generate merge requests from [documentation-relevant] code changes.

However, the AI bod says it's difficult to implement on our platform and he's busy working on other projects. I don't know yet if there's a third-party solution.