When I first talked about my Part 1 of this journey, the assistant could only detect passive voice—covering roughly 30% of the most common style issues in technical documentation. It was helpful—but limited.
Now, it’s so much more.
From detecting a single issue to handling five critical style rules.
The Vision: An AI That Understands Documentation Style
General grammar checkers aren’t built for technical content. This AI assistant is.
It’s trained on thousands of real documentation corrections made by writers, editors, and reviewers—covering rules like:
- Passive to active conversion
- Redundancy reduction
- Tone normalization
- Wordy phrase rewrites
- Ambiguity elimination
“The goal isn’t to replace reviewers—it’s to handle the repetitive, rule-based corrections automatically, so humans can focus on what matters.”
What’s Inside?
Here’s a snapshot of how far this has come:
Evolution of the AI Writing Assistant
| Feature | Initial Prototype (April 2025) |
Current Release (May 2025) |
Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rules Coverage | Passive voice only | 5 critical style rules | +400% rule coverage |
| Dataset Size | 2,500 examples | 15,000+ curated pairs | 6x more training data |
| Output Style | Line-by-line corrections | Context-aware paragraph rewrites | More cohesive document flow |
| Document Support | Plain text only.txt |
Multiple formats.md, .adoc, .docx, .pdf |
Works with real-world documentation |
| Accuracy | ~80% for passive voice | ~92% across all rules | +12% detection accuracy |
| Processing Speed | 3-5 sec/paragraph | 0.8 sec/paragraph | 5x faster processing |
| Integration | Standalone tool | CI/CD pipeline compatible | Fits into existing workflows |
| Domain Adaptation | Generic writing rules | Technical documentation focused | Context-aware suggestions |
| UI Access | Command line only | Gradio UI + API access | Accessible to non-technical users |
Try It Yourself
You can test the assistant in your own workflow with:
- Model on Hugging Face: style-guide-checker
- Dataset (15k+ examples): GitHub repo
- Training Notebook: Colab Notebook
- Gradio-based UI:
app.pyin the repo
Future Development Roadmap
Phase 1: Advanced Applications Beyond Style
Moving forward, I plan to extend the model to handle more complex documentation challenges. The techniques I’m exploring in my AI/ML Documentation Course will be particularly valuable for training the model to understand vector embeddings and knowledge graphs within technical content.
The goal is to create an assistant that can intelligently process API specifications and ML model documentation, identifying not just style issues but also inconsistencies in technical accuracy. By applying the same training methodology developed for documentation style, we envision specialized models for validating API endpoint descriptions against OpenAPI schemas or ensuring ML model behavior is accurately documented.
Phase 2: Extreme Rule Enforcement for Minimalist Documentation
The future iterations of this model will focus on enforcing even more sophisticated writing rules, particularly ones that separate merely good documentation from truly exceptional content:
-
Future Tense Elimination - Converting all future tense statements (“will happen”) to present tense (“happens”) for more direct, authoritative documentation
-
Aggressive Minimalism - Identifying and removing every unnecessary word, aiming for the absolute minimum word count without losing meaning
-
Technical Precision Enhancement - Detecting vague technical descriptions and replacing them with exact, measurable statements
-
Contextual Word Choice - Understanding domain-specific terminology and suggesting the most appropriate terms based on the technical context
These advanced rules build on the foundation established in the current release but push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-assisted technical writing. The techniques explored in my API Documentation and AI/ML Documentation courses will be further refined to train these more sophisticated rule sets.
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