Show Notes
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern, held September 20, 2026. The group gave the book its lowest ratings yet, and much of the discussion is about why: so many of the experiences come across as superficial stunts with AI, rather than true engagement. In our discussion, some found the medical chapter to be the book's strongest section. Other topics: the question of whether you should fix a system before amplifying it, chatbots that give you the candid career advice...
More from I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, held October 18, 2026. Ratings ranged from two stars to five, but most of the group agreed the book made AI warfare feel immediate rather than futuristic. We talk about how much of the kill chain is information work long before anyone fires a weapon, moral injury among remote operators, the habit of clicking allow on every permission prompt, who's to blame when an AI-identified target turns out to be a school, AI-driven...
In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with CT Smith about her new book, WTFM: A Practical Guide for Standing Up Docs at a Startup. We discuss why docs need a human owner even when anyone can generate content with AI, how CT kept her voice by writing the book herself in Neovim, the layered pipeline of Vale hooks, skills, model reviews, and sandbox fixtures that lets Claude Code handle about 40% of her tickets, the risk of gradual disempowerment, and why systems thinking matters most in a first docs hire.
In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Ethan Palm, a technical writer and knowledge engineer at Mintlify, about what happens when nearly half your documentation traffic comes from AI agents. We discuss Mintlify's platform data on agent versus human traffic, hidden directories for agent-only content, the uncertain future of llms.txt, automated doc maintenance workflows where writing accounts for at most ten percent of the job, and the social atrophy that comes from reaching for a terminal prompt instead of a coworker.
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...
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.