Trust Technical Writers, Not LLMs

I have worked in devtool companies for a decade. I’ve watched how teams build and ship products with accompanying documentation. There has been a time when we trusted our coworkers and collaborators, now we tend to trust LLMs more.

Why do so many people think large language models can replace experienced technical writers?

I’ve been on hundreds of calls in the past few months, and I keep seeing the same pattern.

LLMs can generate docs for developers! Right?

The story’s almost always the same, and it keeps happening everywhere.

This is what working on a blog post looks like these days:

Marketing runs a prompt through an LLM → a tech writer fixes the hallucinations → marketing decides the LLM “did a better job” → the tech writer spends more time making it accurate + engaging → marketing runs it through another LLM and ships it without letting the tech writer know what they did.

Nobody’s happy. The copy’s off. The team bond is broken.

And the risk of churn is now a lot more higher. Yes, you read that right. From my experience, every company that relied heavily on LLMs to create their docs and technical content now has a low conversion rate. Getting users to explore new features is a lot harder when the LLM describing those features has no clue about them as well.

You only catch hallucinations when it’s too late

AI tools hallucinate, all of them. When they do so in your docs, you won’t know until someone complains to support. And here’s the worst part - only paying customers complain about documentation. In general, developers only complain if they’ve hit a brick wall. Every mistake in documentation increases their risk of churning.

Developers who are trialing your tool almost never complain about documentation. If they hit a roadblock, they won’t tell you. They’ll just drop off and go straight to your competitor.

That’s how bad documentation affects your growth, turns it into a slow, silent, and deadly churn.

The myth of “faster” with AI

I understand why teams lean on LLMs. Generating content feels instant. Finding and onboarding technical writers takes months unless you hire an agency like Literally. But every “time saving” you think you’ve made disappears when your tech writer has to find and fix all the mistakes in your content. The bigger the project, the worse the lag.

Unlike with blog posts that miss a CTA here and there, bad docs aren’t harmless. It’s often the first hands-on experience someone has with your product. Mess it up, and they won’t be back.

Back to basics

Before LLMs, teams knew the process:

• Marketing, product, and tech writers got aligned from the start.
• Everyone agreed on what’s being made, who it’s for, and why it matters.
• Marketing owned the brief, and the tech writers built from there.

Now too many teams skip alignment, feed the brief to an LLM, and keep their fingers crossed. The result? Content that sounds fine but falls short when developers need it the most.

The real shortcut

It’s faster to get aligned and move in the same direction than it is to fix AI slop.

If you want customers to stick around, give your tech writer the tools and context to get it right the first time. If you don’t know how to find and hire a tech writer, reach out to Literally, we work with hundreds of them.

‍