Last week, head of evals Mike Taylor told us about his 13 beliefs about writing with AI—from putting more into the prompt than you ask the model to produce to living a life worth writing about. His process starts with gathering that raw material: seeking out experiences, debating ideas, and noticing which topics make people’s eyes light up. Today, he shows you how he turns those beliefs into finished pieces, with a process you can adapt to make your own work worth a reader’s time.

For a closer look at how the writers at Every put AI to work, join Mike, staff writer Katie Parrott, and senior editor Jack Cheng for our Write-along tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET, livestreamed on X and YouTube. —Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

It took me a lot of experimenting to find a way of writing with AI that I was happy with. Here’s the process I’ve landed on, from picking a title to arguing with my editor and coaching Claude to write like me. I’m sharing it because it gets the most out of AI, without losing my voice. With this process I’ve cut my writing time for a 1,200-word piece from a day to less than two hours, with no drop in traffic or positive reader comments. Your process will vary with your level of AI adoption. Steal whatever looks useful.

1. Write the title first. The title is 80 percent of why anyone chooses to read a piece; for the writer, a good title provides the conviction to see the piece through. Give the document a title that excites you. You can change it later if the piece takes a different shape.
2. Collect sources. Gather the writing you plan to reference, and talk to people whose perspectives you might include. Extra points for an obscure source few have heard of, or a piece you love and wish more people had read. Research papers are often overlooked because they’re hard to access or use, so translating them can be a valuable service. Paste each quote or statistic—or the full text—with its link in a Sources tab in your document.
3. Create the skeleton. There are many ways to frame a single idea, and the introduction is where that framing gets established. It’s also what convinces a reader to keep reading—so it’s natural to spend the most time on it. After writing the introduction, draft three or four sections with one core idea each, and a placeholder conclusion. Don’t worry about the conclusion; you’ll rewrite it later. Save this in an Outline tab.
4. Record the transcript. Open the Monologue app and record your unstructured thoughts about the piece’s topic. Ramble or correct yourself mid-stream; LLMs can sift through and structure your transcript later. This captures your unique takes and quotable lines. Paste it into a tab labeled Monologue.
5. Write the story beats. From the transcript, ask Claude to produce a bulleted outline: title, section headings, three to four bullets per section, and any important statistics. Send this to the editor or a few friends to check whether the story lands before you shape a full draft. Add it to a tab called Pitch.
6. Generate drafts from multiple models. Feed the same context (title, introduction, sections, sources, transcript) plus your writing style guide (if you don’t have one, ask Compound Writing to build it from your past work) to Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, and GPT-6 Astra.
7. Lego the drafts together. Pick one as the base (I usually use Fable’s, which tends to be sharper and spikier, but I’m always open to testing other models), paste it into a Draft tab, then lift paragraphs, sentences, or lines you liked from the others into a scrap area below a divider in the document. Move the good parts into the main post.
8. Read it end to end, more than once. If you can’t be bothered to read your piece, don’t expect anyone else to. Start at the top and read down; when something’s wrong, stop and fix it, then return to the top and start again. That way you experience the full narrative instead of polishing one section while ignoring the rest; it all has to hang together.
9. React and re-monologue if needed. If the first draft you Lego’ed together isn’t turning out as you hoped, ask yourself how you feel about it and record a second, usually much shorter monologue about the draft: “this bit is wrong,” “that’s not what I intended,” etc. Save this under your original transcript in the Monologue tab and use it to have a model redraft the piece. I rarely redraft more than twice before losing interest in the idea.
10. Self-edit. Rewrite as you go; expect 20–30 percent of the draft to change by the end, with that share falling as the models improve. Add any missing quotes, citations, and statistics from your Sources tab, create visuals (especially for experiments), and create something readers can use—a prompt, an HTML page, an infographic, a script, a template.
11. Write the conclusion. Now that the full draft exists, think about how the piece should end. Claude’s conclusion usually isn’t good enough. Aim for something emotionally resonant—leave the reader with a specific feeling because they will remember the beginning and end more than the middle. You almost always get it wrong. You’re rarely happy with it, and it’s nearly always the thing the editor asks you to change. This is the hardest part because you’ve done everything else and just want to finish.
12. Submit to editors. Expect 50–100 comments. Accept nearly everything on grammar and style, and be easy to work with—assume the editor’s goal is the same as yours (to publish something great), and that they know their audience better than you. But when an edit weakens the idea or makes it unrecognizable as your voice, you have to defend your choice. That allergic reaction you have to an edit you disagree with is a good sign: It means you’ve got a strong point of view worth defending. On the flip side, when an editor challenges your ideas and makes you question your convictions, you may need to rethink your assumptions. Maybe your idea isn’t as good as you thought, or you’re not explaining it clearly. If you’re the type of person that’s weird enough to pursue ideas far enough to write about them, you’ll be excited about things normal people aren’t. Not every draft deserves to make it into the world. Some ideas might need more time and thought to develop to the point where the readers would get it; others might just be stepping stones towards something better.