Proofreading vs. Rewriting: An AI Checklist for Technical Docs

On October 4, 2026, DEV Community published a post about what happens when an AI tool is used to proofread technical documentation. The author handed a README draft to a coding agent and asked it to proofread. What came back was not a corrected draft but a fully rewritten document: the sentences were smoother and the structure tidier, while the author's original voice was gone entirely.

The post also points to two specific "fixes" in which the agent quietly changed technical statements into claims that were no longer true. The author calls this the standard failure mode of "AI polish": the model treats proofreading as a license to rewrite, and rewriting a technical document carries its own risk of distorting what the document actually says.

Drawing on that experience, the author proposes a checklist that separates proofreading from rewriting, intended as a way to check what a coding agent hands back before accepting it. The post does not name the coding agent or model involved, and it includes no response from any vendor. As of this report, the matter rests on the author's single trial and the checklist derived from it, with no other coverage or follow-up in the material.