Trust Technical Writers, Not LLMs (www.literally.dev)

An experienced devtool writer warns that leaning on unsupervised LLMs to produce documentation is backfiring: marketing teams feed briefs to LLMs, tech writers spend hours correcting hallucinations, then marketing sometimes re-runs or ships the output without full writer input. The result is documentation that “sounds fine” but is often inaccurate, fractures team trust, and increases developer churn because users encountering incorrect docs hit roadblocks and quietly abandon the product rather than report issues. This matters because docs are often the first hands‑on experience for trialing developers; errors don’t just irritate—they kill conversion and retention. Key technical implications: LLMs still hallucinate and can’t replace domain context, so the apparent time savings vanish once writers must rescue large projects; only paying customers typically complain to support, so mistakes cause silent, hard‑to‑measure churn. The practical remedy is process and people: keep alignment early, give technical writers the context/tools to author correct docs, and treat writing as a core product function (or hire specialist agencies if you can’t staff quickly).