How I write these posts

Most people don’t like reading text that AI wrote. I don’t blame them, it tends to be bland and over-confident at the same time. So before anyone wonders whether I used AI on this post: I did.

I have an agent set up with examples of my own writing: blog posts from my previous blog, long Slack messages, technical docs I’ve written at work. Not a style guide I wrote about myself, just the writing itself. That’s what it uses to know what I sound like.

I’m a lazy writer, so I write with comments in the draft. Something like:

I read a blog post about how to write effective documentation in the age of AI <<WRITER: find the link, it covered context usage, RFC authoring and was focused on plaintext writing. Also, change the linked text to reflect the title of the source, if multiple sources provide me with them and let's discuss>>

I know roughly what I want to say and where the gap is, I just don’t want to stop and go find the link right now. So I leave a note and keep writing. The agent picks these up later and either fills them in or comes back to me with options. Then I make another pass.

Once a draft is done, I ask the agent to restructure it if that would make it more readable. Sometimes a paragraph I wrote third should be first. Sometimes an example needs to move next to the claim it’s backing up. I read the result and either keep it or push back.

Most of the actual words are mine. What the agent does is make them more correct and more engaging, so that people take the time to read to the end. It’s an editor, not a ghostwriter. The opinions, the examples, the things I got wrong and had to fix, all of that comes from me typing at a keyboard, comments and all.