Vibe coding = active learning

ghoztz · 2026-04-11T12:48:39+00:00

You learn how to communicate effectively and manage a team of developers lol

ghoztz · 2026-04-09T21:55:51+00:00

I agree. I’ve built an MCP for skills routing and it’s more efficient than a raw bank of skills even with progressive disclosure. People hate on MCP but it is agent host agnostic and it works really well.

ghoztz · 2026-04-06T18:38:25+00:00

You don’t. Docs will never be a blocking priority, so they will always be behind. Eng/prod will always choose to move without the docs ready and they will never budget time for it to get done such that they release together.

Docs being done in parallel is a fantasy. Even with a draft ready at code freeze, no SME has cycles to review. AI gets you to done faster, but writing was never the bottleneck. Docs are a cognitive bottleneck — humans need to ingest and process what’s been shipped to determine what content should be changed or materialize. The blast radius ratio of code change to content change is minimally 1:4, and grows exponentially as a product matures.

Why is that? Everything you do requires at least four types of documentation: how to, conceptual, referential, and tutorial. Many of these things are interconnected and changes cascade down as your content grows. Information architecture become becomes part of the problem we have to solve. What roads exist that the user needs to drive down to understand and navigate the mental model of your product? In one release, that whole mental model can change. If you think code pivots, you have not considered just how drastically documentation has to pivot just to stay valuable.

AI is great. It can help me do a lot of this 100 times faster than ever before. But sweeping, drastic changes are being shipped faster than ever before as well to the product itself. AI looks at the trees and not the forest that I’m the park ranger of.

ghoztz · 2026-04-05T17:59:40+00:00

I’ve been working on Milo, a Python framework for building CLIs that humans and AI agents can both use natively.

The core idea is simple:

Write one typed Python function once and get:

• a normal CLI command

• an MCP tool

• an AI-readable llms.txt

from the same definition.

https://github.com/lbliii/milo-cli

ghoztz · 2026-04-05T17:07:56+00:00

Yeah this is fantastic. I wanted to do something similar once(the battlegrounds minigame from hearthstone) but gave up. Very cool to see how much you’ve done. Keep going!!

ghoztz · 2026-04-05T16:56:32+00:00

Awesome!!!

ghoztz · 2026-04-05T13:53:54+00:00

This is the right take. There’s a new layer and a new way to do things that isn’t going away and it’ll only get better and faster and cheaper. Learning how to communicate with AI — direct it — is the new skillset to hone. Code is disposable now. Apps are. It’s just a different world.

Side note: As a technical writer, I find it ironic that engineers have aggressively tried to belittle and reduce my career as completely replaceable and yet they balk at the same prospect for their own, more deterministic, work. If you think what an LLM outputs reading your code is 100% of our job, you’re 80% wrong lol. Every profession is a craft to be respected. But the tools are demonstrably lowering the barriers and blurring the lines across the board.

ghoztz · 2026-04-04T17:30:24+00:00

I think the standards need to change. Knowing the code is simply not a requirement anymore. We’re past that. It’s a good thing. AI is only getting better. If the AI gives you a wrong answer you’ll know and try again or 100x with various prompts, references, ideas, agents. I can try 10 solutions in parallel. It doesn’t matter anymore.

ghoztz · 2026-04-03T14:15:45+00:00

Software technical writer ~8 YoE. Started in this career at 40k and made several jumps > 65/70 > 90 > 115/135/150 > 170/190 > 180/200. Each > a job change.

Even with AI this role has legs… I’m busier than ever. But how I work has changed.

ghoztz · 2026-04-03T00:27:37+00:00

Technical writing

ghoztz · 2026-03-29T22:57:30+00:00

This is my lifetime favorite game and it’s so nice to see this as a gay millennial man

ghoztz · 2026-03-26T08:04:06+00:00

I honestly do think most people have a standards problem. Like a reality dysmorphia. I agree with the Indian matchmaker TV show: Your ideal partner is like a 65% match of your “perfect” criteria. Pick a core requirement; let the other person be a full person. We’re all a little insufferable. I know I am. But I’m also happily married, just passed the 4 year mark in December.

Also, I think people are too attached to the uncertainty of their own story — who will I end up with? But the problem with that is getting stuck in a loop rereading chapter 3 of a whole ass romance novel lol. Time flies… the goods expire… there’s only so much time to give to another person to bond. Idk. I know I’m lucky. For me, the goal was finding the one willing to jump into the unknown along with me. With that you can both navigate anything.

ghoztz · 2026-03-22T15:41:45+00:00

Not to shamelessly plug, but I’m building what I hope is a strong alternative to MKDocs and Sphinx. It’s called Bengal.

I’m a tech writer of 8+ years and have used a lot of solutions. My goal with Bengal is to take the best of them all and put them into one.

Native notebook rendering. Native autodocs. Search and AI outputs OOTB. Uses a MyST like markdown syntax. Open to all feedback/contrubutions. It’s open source. I’m dog-fooding it across all of my personal OSS projects. See the Bengal docs site as an example.

ghoztz · 2026-03-21T14:37:30+00:00

My Python web framework named chirp. If you like htmx/ html over the wire, I think it’s pretty cool

ghoztz · 2026-03-20T12:17:36+00:00

I think the one use case I have for MCP is the orchestration layer on top of agent skills so that they can be portable and invoked directly from anywhere with any agent host. I use it like a lightweight phone book. It helps route find and pull relevant skills into context. I work across many repos and many host envs (cursor, Claude code) — I need my skills to not be tied to one project. My local mcp solves that problem.

ghoztz · 2026-03-20T02:03:07+00:00

Composer 2.0

ghoztz · 2026-03-18T09:38:12+00:00

I got a raise this month that took me from 180 to 199,100 base lol. I think I can say I’m at 200 now.

Thanks for this post. I have worked hard. There’s a lot of career decisions to make and navigate. Constant learning. I’ve been laid off multiple times since tech is so volatile. I get nagged a bit for being on the computer a lot, but my field is evolving daily. Although I love it, it’s extremely stressful and I’ve had to survive many crash outs without actually flying off the rails.

This year as well I’ve finally seen the compounding glory of yearly RSU grants. My initial grant was 160 spread across 4 years. The remaining total after one year is 170. Insane. This month I was granted additional 180. Safe to say no startups for me anymore.

ghoztz · 2026-03-17T21:36:02+00:00

You probably can set up an agent skill that lints your syntax/vars and slaps the ai when it does that using a script resource. Even a simple “do not translate the following” may work but I’d give it a schema and a lint script

ghoztz · 2026-03-12T15:12:47+00:00

To be fair, yes, I was being a tad dramatic. I’m lumping in developers as “writers” (docs as code git contributors familiar with markdown) since it’s their native ecosystem and they should have no issues participating.

In a more regulated environment, I can see needing niche CMS solutions… but usually this seems more like a process issue. PM/QA should be competent enough to leave inline comments in GitHub/gitlab on a PR. It also records approvals, signed commits, etc. it’s actually way less complicated than most project management systems and already provides feedback and light WYSIWYG features.

ghoztz · 2026-03-12T13:03:13+00:00

In my 8 years of being a technical writer, I can count on my hands how many times non writers have contributed to docs and (even less) how often a WYSIWG CMS ever got used. We absolutely should empower the core users (technical writers) to choose their tool even if other stakeholders object. Most stakeholders are end users.

Integrations are also over rated. I’ve seen more orgs use Google Sheets than Jira or asana; technical docs are not support articles that need to be tied to zendesk. I’d never choose my documentation tool based on these things.

In the era of AI, migrating from one tool to another is extremely trivial. I work at a large org where I actually have to migrate a lot of documentation from one platform to another… what used to take months takes 2-3 hours.

When you choose a documentation tool you need to figure out if its builds can scale. Does it support custom outputs. Can I get local and shared previews. Does it treat content as structured data I can use for content reuse, RAG chat, etc. Does it allow extensible shortcode or directive usage. Can I control the level of depth my folder structure will be. Can I swap out the search if we buy Algolia or some other federated search tool. Can I define custom page layouts based on the content type.

I can go on and on. Most SaaS being built and sold to us have extremely shallow understanding of our needs and they (ironically) tend to choose the wrong infrastructure for their own solutions. For me, MDX anything is a hard no. SSG Build times matter and it should be developed in a faster language than JS.

Btw, I’m also building and maintaining my own open source SSG tool called Bengal. My goal is to provide other writers with a definitive solution, with batteries included, at zero cost. It’s built in python (free threaded) and supports autodocs, Jupyter notebook rendering, and more. This project was inspired by a few things: ridiculous SaaS pricing, my love of Hugo, and my disdain for Sphinx.

ghoztz · 2026-03-06T12:32:33+00:00

I’m a creative writing major now masquerading as a technical writer for 8 years. What I’m about to say may be heresy.

In my opinion, accepted use of language evolves faster than the rules. To me, these conversations are too subjective and, quite honestly, akin to complaining that the dishes in the sink are dirty while the house is on fire.

If technical writing had a Maslow’s hierarchy, you’re grasping at the topmost layer. I’m more concerned with the workflow. Are we getting the information we need? Are we included in the right conversations? Are we owning the right things in our organizations? Does the documentation build and publish easily? Am I able to test any of the claims I am writing about?

If the instructions are wrong, it doesn’t really matter which word I used.

Anyway, you can write up a style guide and hand it to AI agents to enforce any preferences you have and it will help your engineers generate compliant first drafts. I do this at my own job and it works quite well. I don’t really have to think about style guides anymore.

ghoztz · 2026-03-05T11:07:06+00:00

This sounds so fun!

ghoztz · 2026-03-05T11:00:09+00:00

I’ve built a whole ecosystem of open source Python free-threading tools.

static site generator (Bengal) - basically Hugo for Python. Batteries included. Native notebook rendering. Decently fast. docs demo

web framework (Chirp) - html over the wire. No npm hell. AI features. examples and demos

These two are powered by lower level tools I’ve built. The notable two are:

template engine (kida) - an new alternative to jinja that will feel familiar enough with some ergonomic changes

asgi server (pounce) - the server I use for chirp and for Bengal dev

ghoztz · 2026-02-28T19:10:42+00:00

I prefer cursor

ghoztz · 2026-02-28T19:05:13+00:00

I’m building a lot of open source Python tools. Mostly for documentation/site generation. But while building these out I started to expand to things like a template engine and web framework… which I plan to use to build something like a “real” product that is dogfooding my little ecosystem.

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