The Missing Layer in AI Adoption

Hello, and happy Sunday! Two housekeeping notes: Our next cohort of Claude Code for Absolute Beginners is taking place on Tuesday, April 14, and Every has opened seven new roles. Join us!—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think” by Katie Parrott/Working Overtime: The discourse about AI and writing generally assumes prompt in, text out, done. Katie Parrott shows her much more involved process: an agent that interviews her before she writes a word, a back-and-forth on her structure that she has to fight for, a panel of AI critics named Hemingway and Hitchcock, and a last read that flags anything that sounds machine-generated. Read this because successful AI writing demands more judgment, not less.

“Your Best AI Strategy Starts at the Top” by Natalia Quintero and Mike Taylor: Most executives approach AI like a software purchase—evaluate, compare features, and plug in. Natalia Quintero and Mike Taylor see it differently: Using AI is people management, not platform adoption. You delegate clearly, check the output, and supply the judgment the model doesn’t have. Read this for the five concrete actions senior leaders can take to increase AI adoption within their companies.

“Get Your Hands Dirty” by Every Staff/Context Window: Anthropic blocked Claude subscriptions from working with third-party agent harnesses like OpenClaw; OpenAI hasn’t—and Opus 4.6 token usage is down significantly while GPT-5.4’s has surged. Plus: why the technical/non-technical split is the wrong way to think about AI adoption, who counts as an “author” when AI does the drafting, and a two-step design workflow from Every’s team.

“How We Run a 25-person Company on Four AI Agents” by Katie Parrott/Source Code: Every runs six products, a media company, and a consultancy—and until recently, COO Brandon Gell was the router keeping all of it coordinated. Now four custom Notion agents handle prioritization, meeting-to-task conversion, OKR planning, and daily growth reporting. Read this for the full breakdown of each agent, and copy-paste prompts to build your own. (This piece was based on a camp sponsored by Notion.)

“Every Is Half Agent Now” by Laura Entis/Context Window: Every gave each employee a Plus One—a dedicated AI agent—and we’re writing the etiquette for them as we go. Brandon Gell and Willie Williams join Dan Shipper to share what they’ve learned: Agents earn trust by executing tasks publicly, and everyone is a manager now whether they’ve had direct reports or not. Plus: Anthropic has built a powerful new model it’s not releasing publicly; 70 percent of Every staff use gendered pronouns for their agents; and a prompt for when your agent won’t stop talking. 🎧 🖥 Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on X or YouTube.

“The Market for Making AI Better” by Alex Duffy/Thesis: Reddit, Shutterstock, and News Corp are making hundreds of millions licensing data to AI labs, with contracts growing 20 percent annually. Alex Duffy argues that that undersells it: A 4-billion-parameter model recently beat one 60 times its size by training on the right financial data. Read this to understand what makes your company’s proprietary data valuable, and whether to license it, train on it yourself, or both.

Log on

We host camps and workshops on topics like compound engineering and writing with AI to share the knowledge we’ve acquired from training teams at companies like the New York Times and leading hedge funds, and by learning and playing with AI every day ourselves.

Upcoming course

• Claude Code for Absolute Beginners (April 14): This beginner-friendly, live workshop led by Mike Taylor (head of tech consulting at Every) is designed to get you from zero to a working project with Claude Code. Learn more.

From Every Studio

Sparkle is getting a full makeover

The Sparkle team has been working on a ground-up user interface redesign—new animations, new onboarding, new everything. General manager Yash Poojary says it doesn’t even feel like the same app. The new version is already available to download from Sparkle’s website. Tune in next week for the full rollout.

Monologue Notes is live

Monologue now saves and organizes your recordings as browsable notes. General manager Naveen Naidu has been using it to capture everything from team calls to solo idea sessions, then pulling those notes into other tools via Monologue’s CLI. The summaries are designed for builder workflows where you want to revisit what you were thinking, not just what you agreed to do. Update to the latest version to try it.

Spiral is experimenting with agent-to-agent workflows

Two days after the release of Anthropic’s new managed agents, Marcus Moretti, general manager of Spiral, has set them up to power Spiral’s API. The setup lets an external agent (rather than a human) hand off a writing task to Spiral, where the two agents interview each other behind the scenes before producing a draft with no human input required. Marcus built a new API endpoint for this flow and added an API label in Spiral’s UI so users can distinguish between agent-generated and human-initiated conversations. The API also now supports attachments and smarter default selections for workspace and style. Conversations via API show up in your Spiral chat history with an “API” label, so you can pick up where the agent left off.

Alignment

The wrong fight. I don’t know what’s in the water in Utah, but whatever it is, I want more of it, because the state is leading the country on using AI in healthcare.

Legion Health, a Y Combinator-backed San Francisco startup, has been cleared to use AI in Utah to renew a handful of psychiatric prescriptions, including Prozac and Zoloft, for patients who are already stable and on an established treatment plan. It’s the second AI healthcare pilot approved there, and it’s replacing the barrages of emails from patients who are stable on the same dose, contacting their clinicians who are already buried in administrative work, who have to produce a piece of paper that says yes, same drug, same dose, carry on. This is often done outside of working hours, and without any reimbursement.

To ensure the pilot is safe, the first 250 AI renewals are reviewed by a physician before anything reaches a pharmacy, and the AI has to agree with that physician more than 98 percent of the time before it can proceed independently. The next 1,000 renewals are then reviewed, with an even higher threshold of 99 percent before the oversight shifts to randomized monthly testing, with Legion filing monthly reports on accuracy and any adverse outcomes throughout.

Yet both the tech coverage and members of the medical establishment have deemed it too risky. The criticism splits into two camps: prescribing error, and the app’s insufficiency to improve access to the patients who need care most. On prescribing error, the hard clinical judgment has already been made by a human; what the AI is doing is confirming that nothing has changed, which it has to get right 98 percent of the time before it’s allowed to proceed unsupervised.

On access, it’s true that you have to already be in treatment to use this service, but if a psychiatrist in rural Utah who typically spends part of their day processing renewal emails for stable patients no longer needs to do so, they have more time for the patients who need them.

Most of Utah’s counties are designated mental health provider shortage areas, leaving around 500,000 residents without adequate psychiatric care.

Physician risk-aversion is one of medicine’s great virtues in the right context, but renewing a stable prescription is not that context, and dressing up administrative inertia as a patient safety concern doesn’t make it one.—Ashwin Sharma

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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