Contributors
The 2026 State of Docs report was produced by Tal Gluck and designed by David Hughes with support from Steve Ashby, Addison Schultz, Suzy Everist, and the rest of the GitBook team. We couldn't have done it without the support we received from the broader documentation community in the form of interviews, suggestions, and feedback.
Ian Alton
Head of Technical Writing | Airbyte
Tina Amirtha-Ingold
Senior Technical Writer | ChannelEngine
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Consultant | lizargall.github.io
Utsav Banerjee
Senior Manager, Product Docs | New Relic
Daniel Beck
Technical Writer and Developer | ddbeck.com
Jared Bhatti
Senior Staff Technical Writer | Waymo
Sarah Biddle
Manager, Technical Writer | Backbase
Gareth Brinn
Documentation Manager | Gravitee
Dachery Carey
Senior Programmer Writer | MongoDB
Chris Chinchilla
Documentation Team Lead | Supabase
Alison Combes
Freelance Technical Writer
Sarah Deaton
Member of Technical Staff | Anthropic
Gareth Dwyer
Founder | Ritza
Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
Principle Technical Writer | Elastic
Christopher Gales
Technical Documentation Leader
Bekah Hawrot Weigel
Developer Experience Consultant | Virtual Coffee
Richard Howard
Senior Technical Writer | parcelLab
Delfina Hoxha
Founder | Little Language Models
Sean Huck
Team Lead, Technical Writing, Platform & Financial Services | Adyen
Lisa Hultman
Vice President, Product Content | ServiceNow
Amarachi Iheanacho
Senior Technical Writer | Sidero Labs
Tom Johnson
Senior Technical Writer, Google
Usha Mandya
Senior Manager, Technical Writing | Docker
Sasha Maximova
Product Marketing Manager | JetBrains
Sandeep Medikonda
Senior Manager, Analytics and Search | ServiceNow
Sarah Moir
Principal Technical Writer | Sigma Computing
Kate Mueller
KnowledgeOwl | The Not-Boring Tech Writer
Shahed Nasser
Head of DX | Medusa
Funke Olasupo
Technical Writer | Rocket.Chat
Diana Payton
HackMamba | Technical Writing Uncensored
Vinay Payyapilly
Director, Documentation | New Relic
Samy Pessé
CTO | GitBook
Doug Purcell
Technical Writer | Supermicro
Abe Raher
Senior Technical Writer | Former Cribl, Cisco, Google
Louis van Roessel
Head of Developer Experience | Adyen
Sarah Sanders
Context Engineer | PostHog
Manny Silva
Head of Docs | Skyflow | Doc Detective
CT Smith
Lead Technical Writer | Payabli
Marco Spinello
Senior Technical Writer | Booking.com
Sara Tandowsky
CEO | GitBook
Larry Ullman
Stellar Docs | First tech writer at Stripe
Hazel Weakly
Engineering Leader in Finance | Nivenly Foundation Fellow
Mirna Wong
Senior Technical Writer | dbt Labs
Aleksandra Zolushkina
Lead Technical Writer | JetBrains
How we used AI
We used AI/LLMs across many stages of writing and producing this report:
Loom and Granola for their AI-assisted interview transcripts.
Claude to help writing Python scripts to assist with data analysis and to generate charts.
Claude Code for synthesizing and identifying broad themes across the interviews, early drafting of the report, and finding some of the highlighted quotes.
GitBook Agent for proofreading and style-checking.
Framer Workshop for small website components, including the animated stat numbers, chart lightboxes, and social sharing.
These tools made writing the report a faster and richer experience with a small team. They also required a lot of human review and intervention to ensure accuracy at every stage of the creative process:
Using AI helped us find some rich and valuable quotes in the transcripts that we might have missed without it.
But it also fabricated some quotes entirely.
These AI tools made the process of analyzing survey data quicker and easier.
But it also made it easier to miss broader context and required careful verification of the data.
In short, our own experience working with AI on this report underscored our findings in the AI and documentation creation section. A report like this consists of a lot of moving parts, and AI made managing them easier. But this couldn't have been written with AI alone.
(This section — like many other parts of the report — was created and edited exclusively by humans.)
Insights
“How can we make sure users just get the information they need at the place they are, rather than making them navigate away from the context?”
Usha Mandya
Docker
“Features do not exist until we write about them and they're released in the product.”
Sarah Moir
Sigma Computing
“There's no universal docs metric — you have to map your work to whatever metrics your leadership already cares about. That's how you prove value.“
Manny Silva
Skyflow | Doc Detective
“You need to learn how to advocate for your value. The information architecture, the advocating for the user, the making decisions — with AI, we're more editors, but we're also more information architects.”
Larry Ullman
Stellar Docs | First tech writer at Stripe
“We need technical writers more than ever because of AI. Right now is the time for companies to double down on documentation.”
Shahed Nasser
Medusa
“I've had so many conversations with writers around, ‘How do I prove that what I'm doing matters? How can I demonstrate ROI in ways that will feel compelling to my higher-ups?’“
Kate Mueller
KnowledgeOwl | The Not-Boring Tech Writer
“There's a shift happening where a lot of product companies are lagging. Your users are just telling their agents to build them something, not mentioning your product. If you're not in the agent's frame of reference, you're never going to come up.”
Dachary Carey
MongoDB
“I don't know how you shop for software, but if I'm looking for a solution, I don't want to look at the marketing site. I want to look at the docs.”
CT Smith
Payably
“The work of a writer is of course to create documentation. But it is also to resist documentation when the writer sees it's not really a documentation problem — it's a design problem.”
Utsav Banerjee
New Relic
“At the end of the day, people explain stuff and write stuff for other humans, even though there is this AI layer in between.”
Aleksandra Zolushkina
JetBrains
Further reading
Purchase Decisions and Business Impact
Save a horse, use a content strategy — Sarah Moir
Even great documentation fails if no one can find it — and when that happens, users end up turning to support tickets, third-party trainers, or chatbots instead.
Makes the case for tech writers as strategic product contributors — think user activation rates and time-to-first-API-call, not just page quality.
How docs have quietly become the new top-of-funnel — the companies winning right now aren’t just building better products, they’re building the most AI-readable product knowledge on the internet.
Docs Team Structure
Great docs aren’t just well-written — they require real organizational investment, and “just make it like Stripe” glosses over everything that actually makes that possible.
Documentation as a shared responsibility — Damilola Oladele
A practical look at how documentation ownership actually gets distributed across PMs, designers, engineers, and legal — and why that matters more than most teams admit.
Thinking Strategically About Documentation — Kevin R. Kuhl
Three models for how documentation teams can position themselves — useful for thinking through where your team sits and where it might want to go.
Docs and Product
Kate sounds off on docs symbiosis — Kate Mueller
The tension between maintenance work and strategic projects isn’t really a conflict — this episode makes the case that they’re actually symbiotic, which is a useful reframe for small teams deciding what to prioritize.
The intractable challenges of technical writing — Kayce Basques
Completeness, correctness, and discoverability — three problems that have never really been solved. Maps directly to the report’s finding that keeping docs in sync remains the #1 challenge.
Makes the case for integrating docs directly into product design rather than treating them as an afterthought — a natural companion to this section’s themes.
The Product is Docs — Christopher Gales and the Splunk Documentation Team
A collection of essays on what it actually looks like to run a doc team inside a fast-moving product org — written from direct experience, not theory.
Docs for Developers — Jared Bhatti, Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nuñez, Heidi Waterhouse
The field guide for developer docs, following a fictional product team through the full documentation lifecycle — from understanding users to publishing and measuring impact.
Docs Tooling
Testing docs IA with AI agents — Sarah Deaton
Built an AI agent to simulate user navigation with real personas — a clever way to test information architecture that works for both human and AI consumers.
Build your own CLI and become unstoppable — CT Smith
A case for tech writers automating their own repetitive work through scripting and custom CLI tools — built a 20+ command CLI that genuinely transformed their workflow.
Docs as code is a broken promise — Sarah Moir
Docs-as-code often ends up being just tool adoption without any real process investment — and while engineering teams have whole teams supporting their workflows, docs teams are lucky to get one engineer.
Measuring the Success of Docs
Docs metrics and the stories we tell ourselves — Sarah Deaton
Honest take on why docs metrics are so hard to interpret — argues for getting incrementally less wrong rather than chasing a perfect unified metric.
Where to start with analytics for documentation — Sarah Moir
Doc teams need a different approach to analytics than marketing does — raw data is misleading without behavioral, product, and business context layered in.
Built an AI-powered tool using Claude API and Playwright that simulates user personas navigating docs to spot usability issues — a creative approach to measuring effectiveness when formal user research isn’t an option.
Data on the massive surge in AI-driven traffic to documentation — directly relevant to the finding that page views are becoming unreliable and teams need new metrics.
AI and Documentation Creation
The writing was always the cheap part — Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
A useful corrective to the “AI makes docs 10x faster” narrative — the real cost of good documentation was never the writing itself, it was all the thinking that had to happen first.
AI-powered ticket triage is surfacing docs gaps in real time — and as LLMs become primary consumers of documentation, the content itself needs to change too.
Why editing matters more than ever with AI-assisted writing — Damilola Oladele
AI writes like a copywriter, not a technical writer — here’s what that means for the editing skills that actually matter now.
How onboarding a human made my AI smarter — Sarah Deaton
Creating onboarding docs for a new teammate simultaneously made AI tools work better — turns out style guides and Vale linting are exactly the kind of context engineering that both humans and AI need.
AI and Documentation Consumption
The Most Actionable Docs Around: Agent Configs — Manny Silva
CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and similar files are documentation — and research shows human-written configs outperform auto-generated ones by 29% on task completion. Worth thinking about as docs expand beyond the docs site.
The missing piece isn't better prompts — it's deliberately engineering what data enters the system's context, when, and for how long.
AI must RTFM: Why technical writers are becoming context curators — Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
Covers CLAUDE.md files, llms.txt standards, and AI-friendly doc formats — a good primer on what “writing for AI audiences” actually looks like in practice.
Directly about structuring docs for AI audiences while maintaining human readability — the core tension in this section.
LLMs vs. Agents as Docs Consumers — Dachary Carey
Model training and real-time agent retrieval are two completely different access patterns — and most "AI-friendly docs" guidance only addresses one of them.
Docs and Professional Development
New habits for tech writers in the age of LLMs — Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
The expensive work now is information architecture, taxonomy, and context curation — writers who lean into automation and tooling will be the ones who thrive.
10 principles of the cyborg technical writer — Tom Johnson
A framework for working alongside AI rather than being replaced by it — develop domain expertise, automate repetitive tasks, and design docs for machine consumption.
Self-Advocacy for Technical Writers — Kevin R. Kuhl
Practical strategies for building visibility and championing docs value — maps nicely to the idea that tech writers need to be louder about what they actually contribute.
Strategies for positioning as a strategic partner rather than a content producer — embracing AI tools while keeping critical thinking front and center.
