For most of my career, the argument about what a technical writer should know has been an argument about tools and craft. Learn this help authoring tool. Get certified in that framework. Master the CMS. It was never a bad argument, exactly, but AI has quietly made it beside the point. When a machine can draft a page, format it to your style, translate it into forty languages, and publish it before you’ve finished your coffee, the question stops being which tools do you know and becomes something more uncomfortable and more interesting: what do you bring that the machine can’t?
I’ve been thinking about a nascent new skill stack. Not tools, not certifications, but human capacities. They’re often thought of as soft skills. The ones that never made it onto a job description are turning out to be the ones that matter most when the playing field gets levelled by AI. To be fair, these skills were always part of what differentiated a great writer from the pack, but they were in addition to knowing tools and having deep craft expertise. With AI in the mix, they might become the new foundation. Here are the six I keep coming back to.
1. Curiosity
Everything starts here. Curiosity is the drive to know how things actually work, not to accept the summary, but to go to the source, read the code, take the thing apart, and find out for yourself. It was always the magic that infused good documentation, but in the AI age it’s also your defence: a curious writer verifies, digs, and asks the next question, while an incurious one takes the confident answer at face value and ships potentially bad content. AI can generate infinite plausible explanations. Curiosity is what sends you to check whether they’re true.
2. Writing well
Yes, still a core skill. More important than ever despite what leadership might be thinking. It’s fashionable, daring even, to say AI can write, and, sure, it can. It produces fluent, competent, grammatically clean prose on demand. What it can’t do is decide: what to say, what to leave out, what order to put it in, what the person on the other end actually needs. Curation is the craft, and it’s the half of writing that was always the hard part. The ability to cut a bloated draft in half without losing what matters, to make one sentence do the work of five, writing well didn’t get cheaper when drafting did. Writing well got rarer, and more valuable.
3. AI immunity
This is the new one, and I think it’s the sharpest. AI immunity is the ability to work with these tools without being fooled by them, without falling for their sycophancy and flattery. The failure mode of AI isn’t bad prose. It’s confident, well-formatted, plausible wrongness: the invented menu path, the limit that’s off by half, the step in the wrong order, the fact pulled from the wrong doc, all delivered with total authority. Which version is correct might come down to you, like: a panda eats, shoots, and leaves vs a panda eats shoots and leaves. An AI-immune writer has the reflex to distrust the fluent answer, to verify every specific against the source, and to know the difference between the things AI is genuinely great at and the things it’s confidently terrible at. They don’t get suckered by the immense increase in their productivity for the sake of it. 10x slop is still slop. They refine, and refine over time until the right thing gets built, the right update gets written. Immunity doesn’t mean rejecting the tools. It means never handing them the one thing they can’t be trusted with: deciding what’s true.
4. Technical aptitude
The writer at the receiving end of technical knowledge waiting for the briefing, documenting what they’re told, is being automated. The writer who can go get it and have opinions about it isn’t. Technical aptitude doesn’t mean becoming an engineer. It means being able to read a bit of code, run the thing and poke at it, call the API, and build your own small tools to manage and check your content. And here’s the good news: AI has collapsed the cost of getting there. You now have a patient assistant who will explain any function, any test, any error, at exactly your level. The locked, gigantic door that kept writers away from the technical side has not only been unlocked but it’s been thrown off its hinges! Walk through it.
5. Collaboration
Documentation has never been a solo act, but in a fast-moving, continuously-shipping organization it’s connective tissue. The writer sits across teams by nature, talking to product, to support, to engineering, to the people who actually know how the thing works. That vantage is a superpower: you’re often the only person who can see that two teams are building the same feature, or that support is drowning in a question the docs could answer in one line. Collaboration, knowing how to draw knowledge out of a busy expert, how to make yourself easy to work with, how to be in the room, is what turns a writer from a service desk into a partner.
6. Growth mindset
Finally, the one that holds the other five together, being open to change, adaptable, looking ahead for opportunities, turning problems into challenges. The ground under our profession is moving, and that isn’t going to stop. New tools, a changing role, skills you didn’t have last year and will need next year, a new title, working with different arrangements of team members. A growth mindset is the willingness to be a beginner again, to lean into the discomfort instead of bracing against it, and it is what lets you do more than keep up. A growth mindset vaults you ahead. The writers who treat change as threat will spend their energy defending a version of the job that’s genuinely disappearing, dying on hills they never would have fought for in the past.
The through-line
Not a tool, not a certification, not something you can put on a résumé and prove with a badge. They’re human skills, and that’s exactly why they matter now: AI raises the value of the things it can’t do.
So if you’re a technical writer wondering how to stay relevant, stop asking which tool to learn next. Ask instead whether you’re getting more curious, writing more sharply, growing more immune to being fooled, more technical, more collaborative, and more comfortable being uncomfortable. Cultivate those, and you won’t be replaced by AI. You’ll be the one wielding it.
— adapted from my book-in-progress on technical writing in the age of AI.