AI Can Describe Code, But Cannot Capture the Unwritten Knowledge Behind It

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A technical writer argues that AI tools like ChatGPT cannot replace human documentation professionals, despite growing claims on social media that they can. The core issue is what the author calls 'Institutional Debt' — undocumented tribal knowledge that exists only in the minds of experienced developers. AI can accurately describe what code does syntactically, but it has no way of knowing the historical context, legacy bugs, or informal workarounds that shaped a codebase over time. Technical writers, the author contends, act as detectives who extract this hidden knowledge through direct conversations with engineers before it walks out the door when staff leave. Replacing writers with AI to cut costs, the piece warns, risks leaving teams blind to undocumented issues that could cause serious production failures.

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