COOKED
The core deliverables — API references, user manuals, release notes, help-center articles, SOPs — are exactly the structured text generation LLMs do at usable quality from source code, specs, and Jira tickets. What resists is the upstream work: extracting undocumented knowledge from engineers who won't write it down, deciding what the documentation set should be, and owning regulated deliverables in medical device, pharma, and aerospace where traceability and validation matter. No license protects the role, and doc teams are already being consolidated into fewer, more senior information architects supervising generated drafts.
Core tasks are already automatable. Turning a merged pull request, a Swagger spec, or a Jira changelog into a release note or endpoint reference is a text-transformation job a model does in one pass, and the 6 rather than 2 is bought entirely by the interviewing — cornering the engineer who shipped an undocumented flag, watching a beta user fail the install, and reverse-engineering behavior the spec got wrong.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The 3 covers the rare days you leave the screen — hardware teardowns for an installation guide, photographing a service panel, walking a factory line to check that the SOP matches what operators actually do — but the deliverable is written in a docs-as-code toolchain and the physical trip is optional for most of the corpus.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no credential gating the title; the STC certifications are resume decoration, and on FDA 21 CFR 820 device labeling or DO-178C aerospace documentation the signatures on the traceability record belong to regulatory affairs, quality, and the DER — you draft, they approve and carry the exposure.
Anonymous artifact production. End users hit your page from a search result and never learn your name, so the 5 rather than 0 reflects only the internal relationships — the specific staff engineer who answers your Slack DM within an hour because you've earned it, and the PM who routes you into design reviews early — which is trust that keeps you employed, not trust a customer would pay for.
Meaningful discretion. The 7 sits above pure procedure because you decide the information architecture: whether something is a tutorial or a how-to, when a deprecation notice goes loud, how to word a warning in an installation step where getting it wrong injures someone — but those calls run through docs review, legal for regulated labeling, and engineering sign-off before they ship.
Has AI actually changed your work?