• Summer ’24 book recommendations?

    Updated: 2024-07-31 19:00:00
    With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion! We’re entering peak summer in the northern hemisphere […]

  • All about creating mysteries in a novel

    Updated: 2024-07-29 20:50:34
    Mysteries are crucial building blocks in any novel, even beyond mysteries, suspense, and thrillers. A good mystery will keep the reader turning the page to find out what happens, provide a jolt of electricity with a good reveal, and deepen what’s at stake. But how do you create a good one? How do you get […]

  • Podcast: Task decomposition and complex tree diagrams

    Updated: 2024-07-28 18:00:00
    This tutorial will help you understand task decomposition by guiding you through the process of creating a complex tree diagram that's too sophisticated for an AI tool to create at once. Whether you're creating tree diagrams or not, it doesn't matter. This is just an example of how to break down complex information into smaller chunks and pass it into AI.

  • Podcast: Using long-token contexts to quality check an entire API doc set

    Updated: 2024-07-28 17:00:00
    One of the advantages of recent Gen AI updates is the massive token input context. When you can pass in an entire set of documentation as an input, you have a much stronger possibility for powerful prompts. In this tutorial, I share some quality-control prompts you can use that deal with entire doc sets as inputs, as well as explain some of the challenges in passing in an entire doc set.

  • Podcast: Using file diffs for better release notes in reference docs

    Updated: 2024-07-28 16:00:00
    You can use AI prompts when creating release notes for APIs by leveraging file diffs from regenerated reference documentation. The file diffs from version control tools provide a reliable, precise information source about what's changed in the release.

  • Podcast: Populating documentation templates using AI

    Updated: 2024-07-28 15:00:00
    In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use AI to populate documentation templates with the source material you've gathered. For example, API overviews often follow a highly structured template. This technique can be a quick way to get an initial draft of documentation, which you can then edit and review with SMEs.

  • Podcast: Gathering source material for context input

    Updated: 2024-07-28 14:00:00
    One of the most successful strategies for using AI is to pass in an abundance of source material that can augument and inform the AI's responses. In this tutorial, I cover strategies for gathering this material, including what types of documents to look for, optimal ordering, pitfalls to look out for such as outdated or slanted information, and more.

  • Podcast: Creating high-fidelity, thematically organized notes from engineering meetings using AI

    Updated: 2024-07-28 13:00:00
    For AI tools to generate accurate information for documentation you're writing, you need to pass in source material. This usually means meeting with engineers and product managers to gather information about the product. In this tutorial, I share prompts for turning those meeting transcriptions into organized, readable meeting summaries. These cleaned up summaries can then function as input context for documentation-oriented prompts.

  • “From Ideas to Shelves” 2024 recap! (This week in books)

    Updated: 2024-07-26 19:00:00
    This week! Books! I had the privilege of moderating the “From Ideas to Shelves” panel at Comic-Con yesterday with a fine roster of publishing and film industry professionals yesterday: Holly Root, Kathleen Ortiz, Ava Jamshidi, Matt Sugarman, and Angeline Rodriguez. It was a bit of a “best of times and worst of times” vibe. While […]

  • Blogging as personal training?

    Updated: 2024-07-26 07:00:00
    Just as we need regular physical training to keep from physical decline, we also need regular training in our daily work. In this post, I reflect on the parallels between physical training and work training, resolving to find a regular rhythm for daily reflection and experimentation about work issues.

  • How many hours do you write a week?

    Updated: 2024-07-24 19:00:00
    With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion! I don’t have the most romantic view of […]

  • Can we really separate art and the artist?

    Updated: 2024-07-22 22:39:31
    News emerged in the past few weeks that distressed a lot of literary fans. As I detailed in last week’s entry of This Week in Books: The late Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an essay about how Munro stood by Skinner’s stepfather even after he admitted to sexually abusing Skinner. Nearly as distressing as […]

  • Using long-token contexts to quality check an entire API doc set

    Updated: 2024-07-15 07:00:00
    One of the advantages of recent Gen AI updates is the massive token input context. When you can pass in an entire set of documentation as an input, you have a much stronger possibility for powerful prompts. In these prompts, the reference docs can serve as a key source of truth. User guide content and drift out of date, but a freshly generated reference doc should be accurate to the code base, for the most part. From this source of truth, you can do all sorts of things, such as identify outdated content in the user guide, see what's new between outputs, get links in your release notes, and more. In this article, I share 8 quality control prompts you can use when passing in your entire reference docs.

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