Hi Reader,

William Imoh, CEO of Hackmamba and all-around insightful person, published a post this week that I keep coming back to. You can read William Imoh's post about original content on LinkedIn, but here's the part that stuck with me:

For those of us who write documentation, that someone is us. We're the keepers of the source of truth for our products, and that role matters more now than it did before AI showed up.

We talk a lot about writing for AI, and usually we mean structuring our docs so agents and LLMs can parse them. AI also delivers our content to readers. When a developer asks a model how to configure an API, the answer they get is our documentation, remixed and presented on demand.

The news industry has worked this way for a long time. The AP and Reuters do the original reporting, and many other outlets pick up those stories and repackage them for their own audiences. Some of them do it well. Morning Brew, for example, takes the day's business news, decides what matters to people who work in business, and explains it clearly with real people behind the writing.

Before we continue, a quick word from today's sponsor:

And now, back to the article.

LLMs repackage our content the same way, but they skip two things the news model depends on: attribution and corrections. When a wire service corrects a story, the outlets that already ran it often don't update their versions, so the wrong facts keep circulating. LLMs make that problem worse. A model that learned from an outdated page will keep presenting the outdated answer, and nobody's name is attached to the mistake.

I say this a lot to the teams I work with: an agent confidently using wrong documentation is worse than an agent that finds nothing. If your docs are the source, every error in them gets syndicated to every developer who asks a model for help.

Keeping a page true after it ships is the part of our job that protects users, and it requires process: clear ownership for every section, review cycles tied to releases, and a way to retire content when a feature changes. None of that is glamorous, and most of it is invisible when it works.

The wire services built their reputations on being the source everyone else could trust. Our documentation can earn the same reputation, as long as someone owns its accuracy for as long as the product exists.

Diana Payton