The technical writer and AI agents: What I learned while building Artie
· 10 min read
Most technical writers don't build AI agents. We document them. We sit in on the sprint review and we read the architecture decision records. Then, we figure out how to explain a retrieval pipeline to someone who just needs to get their integration working by Friday.
But I built one anyway.
His name is Artie, an AI documentation assistant I built using Algolia and embedded in this portfolio site. The process of building him taught me more about the intersection of writing and artificial intelligence than any conference talk or white paper ever could.
This isn't a walkthrough of Artie's design—that's what the case study is for. This is about the broader lessons:
- What AI agents actually are
- How retrieval-augmented generation works under the hood
- Why prompt engineering is closer to technical writing than most people realize
- What this all means for people in this little thing of ours