S6E1 Empowering Technical Writers Through Agentic AI: A Conversation with Manny Silva

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna

Kicking off our season, Manny Silva discusses how agentic AI is transforming technical documentation workflows and explains why human expertise remains essential despite technological advancements. AI agents are tools that extend our capabilities rather than replace technical writers' core skills. Learn why!

Some takeaways from this interesting discussion:

• Definition of agentic AI as applications that take actions based on the tools provided to them.
• How common tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and GitHub Copilot qualify as agents.
• Creating custom AI tools to accelerate documentation drafting processes.
• Using AI to turn a week-long project into a three-day effort.
• The continued importance of human expertise in identifying requirements and context.
• Strategies for incorporating AI tools into existing documentation workflows.
• Establishing boundaries and processes to prevent burnout in the AI era.
• The value of internal documentation in creating successful organizations.
• How technical writers can maintain their relevance by focusing on curation and quality.

Manny shares a six-point checklist for making documentation AI-ready. Listen in for the tips.

Stay tuned for a future episode where we'll explore audio synthesis and multimodal AI in documentation.
Guest Bio
A tech writer by day and engineer by night, Manny Silva is Head of Docs at Skyflow, codifier of Docs as Tests, and the creator of Doc Detective. He’s passionate about intuitive and scalable developer experiences and likes diving into the deep end as the 0th developer.
Show Credits

• Intro and outro music - Az
• Audio engineer - RJ Basilio

Kapitel

1. Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Welcoming Manny Silva (00:00:30)

3. Defining Agentic AI (00:02:58)

4. Agentic AI in Daily Work (00:04:55)

5. Custom Tools and Automation (00:10:53)

6. AI's Impact on Technical Writing (00:16:42)

7. Preventing Burnout with AI (00:30:06)

8. Documentation Checklist for AI Readiness (00:40:56)

9. Future Discussion and Closing (00:53:10)