What AI Actually Changed About My Work as a Technical Writer

For me, the most frustrating part of technical writing was never the writing. It was the waiting. Waiting for a subject matter expert to have a free hour. Waiting for a developer to confirm whether something changed between releases. The information existed. It just lived in someone else's head, or somewhere in a codebase I wasn't expected to touch. To be fair, waiting wasn't always the only option. I've always preferred finding things out for myself, digging into a ticket, tracing a thread, unblocking my own work rather than sitting on a question. But self-directed digging has its own cost. It takes time, it can send you down the wrong path, and without the right tools it's easy to spend an hour finding half an answer. The codebase was there. I just didn't have a good way in. That changed when my team started experimenting with AI-assisted documentation workflows. Where I started I didn't build the workflow. I was asked to test it. A colleague had been developing an AI-assisted approa