I’ll confess my bias up front: I loved manuals. I’m the sort of person who reads the whole booklet before plugging anything in, and I take unreasonable pride in a well-built table of contents. So it costs me something to admit it — the manual isn’t coming back.
Somewhere along the way, everyone’s first move became the search bar. We don’t browse toward an answer through a tidy hierarchy; we ask, and we expect the answer immediately, on the first attempt. Having to search a second time already reads as failure. That quietly demotes the thing I was best at — guiding a reader down through levels of a document — and promotes something else entirely: making a single piece of content easy for a machine to surface, trust, and hand over.
The uncomfortable part, for a lot of writing teams, is that this is now as much an engineering problem as a writing one. Content has to be modular, tagged, and reachable by whatever system is doing the answering. The shift I keep pushing my team toward is simple to say and hard to live: write for the answer, not the page. The page is just one of the places that answer might happen to show up.