{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/technical-writers/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Technical Writers",
    "soc_code": "27-3042",
    "category": "Media",
    "us_employment": 45500,
    "median_annual_wage": 90390
  },
  "verdict": "COOKED",
  "risk_resistance": 23,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 6,
    "embodiment": 3,
    "liability_shield": 2,
    "trust_premium": 5,
    "judgment_accountability": 7
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "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.",
    "embodiment": "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.",
    "liability_shield": "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.",
    "trust_premium": "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.",
    "judgment_accountability": "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."
  },
  "rationale": "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.",
  "outlook": "Headcount contracts sharply over ten years as one senior writer with generation tooling covers what a team of four did, with the surviving roles concentrated in regulated industries and docs-as-code engineering.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Regulated-documentation regimes attaching named-human accountability: FDA 21 CFR 820.30/IEC 62304 design-history-file and IEC 82079 instructions-for-use where a named person signs off, plus EU MDR technical documentation and the EU AI Act Annex IV technical documentation duty. If notified bodies or FDA inspectors begin requiring an identified human author/reviewer attestation for AI-generated IFUs, labeling, and validation protocols — and 21 CFR Part 11 e-signature records name that person — the medical-device/pharma/aerospace slice of the occupation gains a real signature requirement.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift is genuinely two-tiered here: if generated drafts absorb API references, release notes, and help-center articles, the residual role is information architecture, docs-as-code toolchain ownership, taxonomy/metadata design for retrieval, and eliciting undocumented knowledge from engineers in interviews. A further concrete driver: enterprises requiring curated, version-accurate documentation corpora as grounding for their own customer-facing support bots — making corpus stewardship an ongoing judgment job rather than page production.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Formal ownership of documentation as a safety artifact: if aerospace (S1000D/ATA), pharma validation, or device firms designate a documentation owner who must justify what is documented, what warnings appear, and what traceability matrix links requirement to test — and that person is named in audit findings or recall investigations — the role owns consequential calls rather than executing tickets.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Narrow route only: procurement and audit contexts where a customer or regulator demands human-authored, human-verified documentation — e.g. defense/aerospace contract clauses barring unattested generative output in deliverables, or hospital purchasers requiring attested IFUs. No general consumer or developer-docs market pays for human authorship.",
        "plausibility": "unlikely",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Even with the regulated-deliverable levers, the headcount story doesn't reverse: signature and architecture duties concentrate in a small senior tier per company, so scores can rise for the surviving role while the occupation's worker count keeps falling. Embodiment has no route."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 49960,
        "wage": 70930
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 50350,
        "wage": 71850
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 50760,
        "wage": 72850
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 48880,
        "wage": 74650
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 47620,
        "wage": 78060
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 48620,
        "wage": 79960
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 47970,
        "wage": 80050
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 55530,
        "wage": 91670
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 45500,
        "wage": 90390
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -8.9,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}