The Docs Pipeline of the (Near) Future

 Manny Silva, of Skyflow, started by saying that he's going to talk about how the ways we create content is going to change. 

Today's pipeline consists of authoring, publishing, and collaboration tools. (C)CMS pipeline includes DITA tooling, WYSIWYG editors, PDF & HTML, and Sharepoint and Jira. Kind of looks like first get a request in Jira, author content in CMS, and then output. Docs-as-code gets a but more complicated. More tools, each one doing less. 

What about AI? Much digital ink has been spilled about how AI has upended everything. It's not going to replace writers. (But will change how we work.) Generative AI benefits from personal, targeted use. Not everything can or should be solved by AI. 

Challenges with current pipeline: content is created manually, time-consuming validation, and maintenance overhead. 

Three categories of new tools that will help automate routine tasks. 

Content generation. Tools that assist in creating documentation content. Rapidly produce first drafts, freeing us to focus on refinement. For creating novel technical content. 

But generation challenges include that there are a lot of generation tools already, with more coming out. 

Content testing, which embodies docs-as-tests as a strategy. Docs are testable assertions of product behavior. Validates information before publication. Not for validating syntax or style, which is what linters do, but that doesn't validate the actual content accuracy. 

Testing challenges include a learning curve (not traditional tech writer tools).

Content self-healing tools represent the cutting edge of documentation automation. They automatically identify and resolve common documentation issues with minimal intervention. 

Self-healing tools require a deep understanding of technical documentation content and why the structure is important. They don't understand IA and why we do the things we do. There are also security issues. How can you be sure that there will be a human in the loop?

Thyese advancements are not about replacing technical writers, but about empowering them. They allow tech writers to focus on high-value tasks and produce more accurate, trustworthy documentation.  You can maintain larger doc sets and adapt quickly to product changes. This elevates the role of tech comm.