In this guest post, Diana Cheung explores how to learn AI by using deliberate practice to enhance her prompting skills. As a deliberate practice effort, she emphasizes intentional, systematic practice rather than mindless repetition, similar to how one would learn coding or other skills. In this post, she shares her attempts at using Claude.ai to work through editorial improvements to a GitHub project's API documentation.

Documentation scripts perform processes such as building reference documentation or doing other repeated processes with docs. This tutorial builds on the conceptual content in Use cases for AI: Develop build and publishing scripts. In this tutorial, I get more specific with strategies and techniques for prompts, walking through a prompt to build a script for generating reference docs.

At the start of the year, I wrote a trends post and noted uncertainty about the directions AI will take tech writers this year. (See My 2024 technical writing trends and predictions.) Now that we're into April, I have a better sense of how things are going and wanted to provide an update here. My main observation is that AI is accelerating my technical writing output, making me about twice as productive as before. Also noted in this post: prompt engineering is a non-obvious skill that many tech writers still struggle with, even though documentation is more within AI's sights than creative content.