Review of The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut -- thoughts on logic and the end of play

We recently read The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut in my AI Book Club. This was our first work of fiction, though much of the text is imagined biography, so not really traditional fiction. It reads more like a collection of short biographical facets, connected thematically but lacking a tighter plot coherence. The last third of the book barely resembles the first two-thirds of the book, mostly in narrative style, as it shifts from von Neumann to Lee Sedol. However, the author is constructing a larger critique about the acceleration of science/logic and AI towards an incomprehensible, horrific end. Despite the lack of a more coherent plot, thematically the book coheres quite well and is thought-provoking and deep. The core idea: Logic pushed to its limits results in madness. Read more »

AI Book Club recording of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78 as a case for human unpredictability, the garage door scene as a metaphor for the gap between AI labs and what people actually want, and von Neumann's deathbed claim that a machine would have to play like a child. Read more »

Reflections on Ai4 conference - some absences from a tech writer's POV

This week I attended Ai4, promoted as the largest AI conference in North America. It was held at The Venetian in Las Vegas and lasted 3 days. The conference had more than 12,000 attendees (from 100 countries), 400 exhibitors/sponsors, 1,000 speakers, 700 sessions, keynotes from luminaries, and more. Needless to say, the sheer size of the conference was overwhelming. In this post, I'll share thoughts about the conference, focusing on a few key things:The overwhelming size of the conferenceThe focus on agents and near absence of skills talk The absence of any vendors tackling tech comm solutions Whether conferences are good places to learn Read more »

Orchestrating docs instead of writing them yourself — podcast with Sarah Deaton of Anthropic

In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Sarah Deaton, a technical writer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code docs, about what documentation work looks like when much of it is automated. We discuss orchestrating docs through skills and agents rather than writing them, mining AI assistant conversations for doc gaps, running forensics on every false claim that reaches the docs, new metrics like time-to-correction and steers per PR, the fences that keep AI-generated docs honest, and how she closed more than a hundred pull requests in a single day. Read more »

Building out a course on agent skills

I'm trying to build out a course on agent skills. For a while I've been looking for something more substantial and stable to sink my teeth into (similar to what I did with API documentation), and I think agent skills just might be it. Read more »

The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part II)

This is Part II of a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy transitions from describing the reasons for the gap between academics and practitioners (explained in Part I) to solutions. Some solutions involve increasing the conversations between academics and industry professionals, collaborating more with workplace research, having industry professionals guest speak in academic programs, teaching academics what research methodology is acceptable in the workplace, and more. Read more »

The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part I)

This is a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy explains why there's such a gap between industry practitioners and academics. He lays out the case with everything from language, cadence, pressures, motivations, job cycles, promotions, and more, in as clear and straightforward way as possible. This is part I of II. Read more »

Tom's opinionated guide to skill building 101

The thing I'm most excited about with AI lately is SKILLs. (I have to capitalize the word at first so you know I'm talking about agent skills rather than just general capabilities; however, I'll subsequently just refer to agent skills as skills.) I've now built about 10 skills for various purposes, and I'd like to write a post that shares some of my thoughts around skill building in a more opinionated way. Read more »