Humans Commons — A Plainspoken Guide for Technical Writers

Oct 15, 2025

If you write documentation in 2025, you’re living with an odd roommate: a polite, hungry robot that reads everything you publish and then explains your product to someone else in a voice you don’t entirely recognize. Some days it’s flattering. Other days it’s like overhearing your biography retold by an enthusiastic parrot.

Humans Commons is a response to that living situation. It’s a family of licenses that says, in clear language, who your writing is for—humans, robots, or both—and on what terms.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand it. Think of Creative Commons with a dimmer switch for AI.

On one end, there’s “humans only,” a velvet rope that lets people copy and share with credit but tells automated systems to kindly keep their digital hands to themselves.

On the other end, there’s “open to humans and agents alike,” a wide‑open porch light that welcomes copilots, chatbots, and indexing tools to read, quote, and learn—because, frankly, that’s how a lot of your readers will experience your work anyway.

Why should a technical writer care?

Because the audience has quietly split in two. There are the people who come to your site, scroll past the hero illustration, and actually read. And then there are the people who never visit at all; they send a question into a tool, and that tool raids a memory palace of half‑digested web pages to answer.

The second group is growing. If you want those answers to be accurate, current, and blessed by you, it helps to be explicit about what the robots may consume—and it helps even more to give them something nutritious to chew on.

This is where the idea of two layers comes in. Keep your narrative layer—the hard‑won explanations, the patient analogies, the messy stories about why a feature is the way it is—squarely focused on humans. That’s the part where your voice matters, where tone and trust and judgment live.

You can protect that voice with a Humans Commons license (AI0-BY) that welcomes human reuse with attribution while drawing a bright line for automated systems. No more waking up to find your how‑to guide reborn as a soulless blob on a content farm.

Alongside that, publish an agent layer. Not a second website, just a quiet backbone of structured truth: schemas, definitions, error codes, canonical Q&A, little beacons of unambiguous facts. This is the material that agents can ingest without mangling your meaning. It’s the opposite of a mystery novel. When a customer asks a chatbot how rate limits work or what a 422 means, you want the answer to come from something you wrote on purpose, not a three‑year‑old conference slide in the wild.

Humans Commons gives you the labels to make the split legible. You can say, out loud and in metadata, “this essay is for people,” and “this spec is for people and their robot helpers.”

It’s not a force field; scrapers will scrape. But it’s a line of intent that honest actors can follow and that gives you leverage when your work turns up somewhere it shouldn’t.

More importantly, it’s a design decision. When you decide which parts of your content are meant for machines, you inevitably write those parts better—shorter, clearer, easier to cite, easier to keep fresh. You stop feeding the parrot random crackers and start serving it measured teaspoons of truth.

Knowing about this—about the licensing knobs and the two‑layer posture—lets you do some surprisingly practical things:

You can dial down the anxiety that every paragraph you craft will be strip‑mined into generic slurry.
You can encourage agents to point back to your source—your doc, your version—because you gave them stable URLs and the right to use them.
You can tell product and support, with a straight face, that yes, you intend for copilots to answer routine questions correctly, and here’s the content designed to make that happen.
You can ship your changes with confidence because your agent layer is versioned like code, and your narrative layer can indulge in metaphors without breaking the API of understanding.

There’s also a cultural win in all this. Teams stop arguing about whether robots are “stealing” content and start talking about which content is for which kind of reader. The conversation becomes less moral panic and more information architecture.

It’s oddly calming. You still get to be protective where it counts—your voice, your stories, your carefully edited walkthroughs—while being generous with the facts that enable good automation and fewer support tickets at 2 a.m.

If you’re already picturing your own docs, the path forward is simple enough to try in a sprint: pick one guide you’re proud of and keep it human‑only; then extract the half‑dozen facts that guide keeps repeating and publish them in a machine‑readable format with a permissive label. Let the robot roommate eat the facts and leave the dinner conversation alone. See what it does to your search traffic, your chatbot answers, your support queue. Adjust. Repeat.

That’s the gist of Humans Commons for documentation folks. It’s not a crusade and it’s not a trick. It’s a way to acknowledge the world as it is—half human, half agent—and to write like you mean it for both.

When the tools paraphrase you tomorrow, may they paraphrase you, not a rumor about you. And when a person lands on your page, may they still feel the presence of a writer who knew they were there.