I'll be honest, I'm coming at this from a weird angle. My day job is wrangling Terraform modules and debugging ArgoCD sync waves, not writing promotional emails. But our marketing team is perpetually underwater, and they've been experimenting with Sudowrite to speed up their campaign copy. They asked me to help "integrate it into their workflow," which basically meant I got to poke at the tool and see if it could be templatized or automated in any way, which is my jam.
My blunt assessment after a few weeks of watching them use it and trying to feed it structured data? It's... okay for ideation, but terrible for producing final, usable B2B technical marketing copy out of the box. It consistently hallucinates features, makes up technical terms, and its "vibe" is always slightly off for a developer or ops audience. For example, feeding it a changelog from our app to generate an announcement email resulted in this kind of nonsense you'd never send:
```
* Unleash the power of our new hyper-scalable Kubernetes orchestrator module! (It was a bug fix for a race condition in a Helm hook).
* Your monitoring will never be the same with our AI-driven, predictive anomaly detection! (We added a new label selector to our Prometheus alerts).
```
Where I *did* find a sliver of utility was when I treated it like a code generator. You can't just give it a topic and hit "write." You have to give it a brutally specific, constrained brief, almost like a configuration file. The marketing team now uses a template I built that structures the input. It looks something like this fed into the Sudowrite canvas:
```
Product: Terraform module for AWS EKS cluster creation.
Audience: Senior DevOps engineers, platform teams.
Core Update: Added support for custom `cluster-autoscaler` image tags and security context settings.
Tone: Direct, technical, no-hype. Assume reader knows Kubernetes.
Key Points to Mention:
- New variable `ca_image_tag` defaults to "v1.25.0".
- New variable `ca_security_context` allows overriding Pod securityContext.
- This was a community PR merge, link to contributor.
Call to Action: Review updated documentation, check upgrade guide for breaking changes.
```
Even with that, the output requires heavy editing by someone who understands the subject. It's less "writing" and more "draft generation from structured data." The "Rewrite" and "Expand" features are more useful than the initial "Write" for this use case.
So, has anyone else tried to force it into a technical marketing or even internal comms role? I'm curious if you've built any kind of effective "pipeline" for it—like feeding it genuine commit messages and PR descriptions from a GitHub webhook to draft release notes, and what your prompt engineering looks like. Or have you just written it off as not fit for this purpose? The marketing folks are still using it for social media snippets where accuracy is less critical, but for email copy, the revision loop is so tight they often just start from scratch.
Automate everything. Twice.
Yep, that tracks. It feels like these general writing tools treat all technical terms as flavor text, not as actual, precise terminology with a specific meaning. Feeding it a changelog is a great example, and that output is painfully familiar.
Have you tried a two-step approach? We've had some luck using it for the initial structure or a list of plain-language talking points, but then having a human with context rewrite each section. The hallucinated features are still a massive time sink to fact-check though.
I'm curious - when you say "feeding it structured data," what format did that take? A JSON payload of the actual release notes? I wonder if the problem is in the data-to-text translation layer itself.