What building an AI documentation assistant taught me about technical writing
· 9 min read
Most technical writers don't build AI agents. We document them. We sit in on the sprint review. We read the architecture decision records. Then we figure out how to explain a retrieval pipeline to someone who needs their integration working by Friday.
I built one anyway.
His name is Artie, an AI documentation assistant I built with Algolia. He runs inside this documentation site. Building him taught me more about writing and AI than any conference talk could.
This isn't a walkthrough of Artie's design. The case study covers that. This post covers the broader lessons:
- What AI agents actually are
- How retrieval-augmented generation works in practice
- Why prompt engineering is closer to technical writing than most people realize
- What this all means for people in this little thing of ours