On becoming a Slop Janitor: An enemies to lovers story
The talk shares a perspective of a technical writer who started out as a passionate AI/LLM hater, has slowly come to terms with the gloomy reality, and is now at the forefront of introducing AI workflows in their company, while staying as far away as possible from the tech-bro attitude. The goal is to present concrete, real-life examples and quick case studies of how AI completely reshaped a writer's job. This is a story of unleashing AI (mostly Claude Code) to deal with thousands of files of legacy content, full-on release notes automation, branded docs formatting, UI texts scraping, auto-updating reference docs, and vibe-coding internal tools. Full creative freedom, countless hours and tokens spent on AI adoption have allowed the author to form an opinionated conclusion of whether AI is here to stay.
Mateusz has spent almost 4 years working as a technical writer in the telco industry and the world of internet service providers. Previously, he worked as an English teacher, a PL-EN phone interpreter (supporting healthcare and emergency services), and a corporate docs pusher. He holds an MA in English Philology with a specialization in Translation Studies. Outside of work, he loves retro video games and is an avid reader and a culture-lover (art, TV series, podcasts and many more). Cooking and baking are among his greatest passions. Quite a private person, so he maintains very little online presence.