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Use AI to make better editorial decisions, and carry what you learn into the next story
Writing is part of most jobs. You’re expected to explain a complicated decision to your team, make a case for a project, or write a newsletter someone will want to read. Having something to say is a start. Figuring out how to say it—and whether it makes sense to anyone outside your own head—takes work. Doing all that without an editor—which I’m lucky enough to have but most jobs don’t come with—is even harder.
AI can help. It can interview you to draw out an idea, suggest ways to organize your thoughts, draft a passage, or point out where your explanation loses the reader. If you’re still developing confidence as a writer, that gives you somewhere to begin and feedback to work with. If you write professionally, it gives you more ways to test an argument, experiment with an unfamiliar form, or question a habit you’ve stopped noticing.
I’m a professional writer, and I use AI for all of those things. But my early approach to collaborating with the tools involved a lot of repetition: explaining what I wanted, correcting the output, and doing it all over again with the next piece. I could get a draft I was happy with, but I had to start from zero every time.
Compound Writing is the methodology and toolkit I built to make each writing session smoother than the last. It packages the methods I use into a plugin—a collection of reusable instructions for an AI agent such as Claude Code or Codex. Those instructions guide the agent through jobs like interviewing, outlining, drafting, and reviewing. Alongside them, you keep files with examples of your writing and guidance about your voice and editorial standards. When a session teaches you something worth using again, you update that guidance.
The back-and-forth is still writing. You decide whether a question is useful, an argument holds up, or a sentence sounds like something you would say. The advantage is having help available throughout the process, with methods and context you can refine instead of recreating them for every assignment. You can also write every word of a piece yourself and use the agent only for questions and feedback.
This guide will show you how to set up the toolkit and use it on a piece of writing you care about finishing. We’ll follow one of my essays from the Working Overtime column, “Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think,” from brainstorming through revision, including the suggestions I rejected. You’ll see what to prepare before you start, what happens while you write, and how to save what you learn for the next piece.
There are as many ways to write with AI as there are people writing with AI. This is one way, heavily grounded in how I approach and think about writing—from my 13 years of professional writing experience and two years writing about writing with AI. But someone else could start from the same beginning—“Adapt compound engineering for writing”—and come to a completely different endpoint. That’s the beauty of a creative process.
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Every writing process looks different, but most writers move through the same stages—even if in a different order or with more or less formality. Compound Writing turns these familiar stages into defined jobs an agent can perform with you, then adds a final “compound” step so that the AI “remembers” to apply a lesson next time.
Each stage of Compound Writing leaves an artifact you can inspect: notes, an outline, prose, a critique, a readiness decision, or a lesson you’d like to save. You can enter the workflow at whatever stage the piece is in when you need support and return to an earlier stage when the work calls for it.
Ideation means finding an idea worth developing. The best method I’ve found for drawing out new ideas is to have the AI act as an interviewer. This forces you to translate hazy thoughts into concret
e words: what happened, why it interests you, what you believe it means, and what you still need to find out. You leave this stage with raw material for the piece, such as notes, questions, examples, or a possible central claim.
Here’s an interview prompt I used to kick off my piece, “Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think:”
I have an idea for an article that responds to the criticism that writing with AI is inherently lazy. Can you go into interview mode to extract what I think?
From there, the skill is tuned to go back and forth with you until it has the material for a full piece as defined in your VOICE.md and STYLE.md. I’ve found that this typically takes between 15 and 30 questions, depending on the depth of the piece and my clarity about what I want to say. (If I’m still exploring, it can take more questions to get to the idea!)
Commands to use
cw-brainstorm: Surface possible subjects, questions, and angles when you don’t yet have a specific idea.cw-interview: Ask questions that draw out your thinking about an active idea and organize your answers without supplying the argument for you.An outline is a plan for how the piece will unfold. You decide what the reader needs to understand first, which sections develop the argument or story, where the evidence belongs, and what the ending should deliver. This is a chance to spot missing material or a weak sequence before you commit to full paragraphs.
When I was working through the piece mentioned above, I went through several rounds of back and forth with the model looking at different outline shapes to see if I liked it better as a list of insights, or as a continuous story. I experimented with having a case study as a stand-alone section or working it into the structure throughout. I also asked it for multiple takes on the thesis (the core argument of the essay) and the promise of the piece (a term we use at Every to explain what the reader can expect if they read through the piece).
You never have to accept the model’s first offer—iteration is one of AI’s superpowers, and you should use it to your advantage here as well as in the steps to come.
Commands to use
cw-thesis: Generate possible central claims to help you decide what the piece is saying.cw-promise: Generate ways to clarify what the reader will get from the piece.cw-outline: Arrange your notes and interview material into a structure, from a broad sketch to a detailed section plan.Drafting turns your material and plan into prose. You write the opening, develop the sections, connect the ideas, and work toward an ending. A draft gives you language to react to and revise; it can also reveal gaps you couldn’t see in the outline. You can work through the whole piece or develop one section at a time.
Some best practices I follow when I’m in drafting mode: I always go section by section. Sometimes a change I make in the introduction will influence everything farther down the essay, or a tweak to the storytelling in section two will impact how it comes back in section five. Again, always ask for options. Don’t like the first option it gives you for your opening? Ask for three others.
Commands to use
cw-draft: Turn notes, sources, an outline, or partial prose into a draft using the active voice and project standards.cw-hook: Generate alternative openings for the material.cw-transition: Suggest ways to connect sections or move between ideas.cw-analogy: Generate comparisons that help explain a concept.cw-simplify: Rewrite a difficult passage in plainer language.Review means reading the draft critically to see what works and what needs to change. Both in the plugin and in publishing, editing gets split into two “buckets”: developmental edit and line edit. A developmental edit examines the larger decisions: the argument, structure, evidence, and payoff. A line edit examines the sentences: their clarity, rhythm, wording, and length.
The plugin also comes with an extensive set of reviewer personas you can invoke to review the content for specific elements. For example, /hitchcock tests your draft for suspense and the leaning-in factor that defines Alfred Hitchcock’s work, while /sorkin checks if the draft moves along like one of the famous walk-and-talk scenes in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.
If I haven’t already invoked the reviewers in the outline stage, I bring them in with full force here. If there’s a glaring hole in my argument, I want to know, so I run “objections.” If there’s a section that’s hard for a first-time reader to understand, I want that flagged as well, so I call in “reader.” Then, I can either work through the revisions myself or kick back into drafting mode to tackle larger changes.
Commands to use
cw-dev-edit: Assess the argument, structure, stakes, evidence, and payoff.cw-bluf: Identify the most important idea and judge whether the opening puts it where it belongs.cw-reader: Read as someone encountering the piece for the first time and flag confusion, missing context, or broken expectations.cw-objections: Surface credible counterarguments and reader resistance.cw-line-edit: Revise sentences for clarity, rhythm, diction, and economy while preserving meaning and voice.cw-panel: Gather several reviewer perspectives and synthesize their agreement and disagreement.cw-debate: Have reviewers respond to one another across rounds to work through competing interpretations.Finalizing means deciding whether the piece is ready to share. Check that it delivers on its promise, that consequential claims have support, and that the language and presentation meet the project’s standards. Resolve missing information, links, permissions, and disclosure requirements. Check facts against the underlying sources. You or your editor makes the decision to hit publish.
Having run the finalize step multiple times, I find there are a common set of checks I run on every draft: first a final /reader review to check for clarity; then an ai-check to catch any stray “AI smell” that might have gotten through the drafting process and a personalized /guardrails skill that checks some of my specific writing foibles, like overusing rhetorical questions and not defining concepts on first appearance. These are ostensibly small cosmetic changes that can make all the difference between a draft that looks slapped together and one that feels solidly constructed.
Commands to use
cw-voice-check: Compare the prose with your voice guidance and identify language that has drifted.cw-ai-check: Find or remove AI residue, including unsupported additions, inflated certainty, and formulaic prose.cw-tracks: Find scaffolding and process narration left behind while the piece was taking shape.cw-final-pass: Assess publication readiness and identify unresolved problems.Compounding means looking back at the process and deciding what you want to carry into future work. A repeated correction may reveal a missing voice rule, an editorial standard, or a better way to work. Separate those reusable lessons from choices that belong only to this piece, then save the confirmed lessons where future sessions can find them.
Commands to use
cw-save: Propose or save a confirmed preference, editorial lesson, or workflow improvement in the appropriate maintained file.To use the Compound Writing plugin, you need an agent that can run it, the plugin installed in that agent, and somewhere that the agent can access your writing. Think of the plugin as the recipe book, the agent as the cook, and your writing home as the kitchen…
Start with one idea or draft. You don’t need every skill, a finished voice guide, or all the folders and files below before you begin. The inventory shows what comes with the plugin, what belongs to you, and when to add it.
| Part of the system | Where it lives | When you need it |
| Agent: Claude Code or Codex | The app you work in | Before using the plugin |
| Compound Writing skills | Installed plugin | Install once; choose skills as needed |
| Writing home | A folder you choose | Start with one idea or draft |
VOICE.md and STYLE.md
|
Your writing home | Begin in onboarding; refine as you work |
examples/ |
Your writing home | Add samples when you have them |
| Notes, sources, outline, drafts, reviews | Each piece’s folder | Create or add during the work |
AGENTS.md or supported workspace instructions |
The agent’s workspace | Optional routing, especially across projects |
| Confirmed lessons | The relevant guide, checklist, or piece notes | Save during or after a piece; test next time |
The plugin contains the methods. Each skill is a set of instructions for an editorial job: Interview the writer, propose an outline, examine an argument, or revise a passage. The instructions can be read and adapted. They need an agent to carry them out.
Claude Code or Codex reads the relevant instructions and project material, asks questions, generates prose, and proposes edits. Its access to files and connected apps depends on your setup. The same writing method can work in different environments, even when the mechanics of opening or editing a document change.
Your writing home is a folder on your desktop that you designate for your writing project. It supplies the context the model needs to successfully adopt your style: voice and editorial standards, examples, sources, drafts, and decisions. It belongs to you and stays separate from the plugin installation. The plugin describes how to conduct a developmental edit; your project tells the agent what this particular piece needs to do.
Begin with one body of work: your newsletter, a series of essays, or the briefs you write for your team. Here is the folder architecture the plugin sets up on first use:
my-writing-project/
├── VOICE.md
├── STYLE.md
├── examples/
└── drafts/
└── current-piece/
├── notes.md
├── outline.md
└── draft-version-one.mdThe .md extension means Markdown: plain text with simple formatting. You can read these files yourself, edit them, and ask the agent to revise them.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, begin these files as part of setting up your writing folder. The plugin gives the agent reusable writing methods; these documents tell it how you write, what the project requires, and where to find your work.
There are three key documents to be aware of:
VOICE.md: This describes how your writing sounds—word choice, sentence rhythm, humor—with examples the agent can learn from.STYLE.md: Your project’s editorial standards. It defines who you’re writing for, what the writing should accomplish, and expectations for structure, evidence, and sourcing.AGENTS.md: An optional instruction file that tells your desktop agent where your writing lives and which context files to read before starting work.The setup and onboarding skills can help you create initial VOICE.md and STYLE.md files from writing samples and a conversation about your preferences. Add an AGENTS.md file if you need to direct an agent working across multiple folders to that context. Start with what you know—you’ll refine the guidance as you work on actual pieces.
For an agent working across your desktop, an AGENTS.md file can point to the right project and specify which context to read. Think of it as a short directory. A Codex workspace instruction might say:
For writing work in Writing/my-project:
- Read Writing/my-project/VOICE.md for sentence-level guidance.
- Read Writing/my-project/STYLE.md for editorial standards.
- Read the current piece’s notes, sources, outline, and draft.
- Keep new draft versions and reviews inside that piece’s folder.
Use the workspace instruction file your agent supports. Keep the voice and style rules inside the writing project so they remain easy to find and revise.
For a broader desktop setup, see ChatGPT for Knowledge Work.
Give the agent examples of language you want to preserve and explain why they work. “Conversational and smart” leaves a lot open to interpretation. Sentence length, vocabulary, punctuation, humor, and the way a paragraph turns give it more to work with.
For my writing, a useful instruction describes long accumulations followed by a shorter release. Another protects the clauses that set up a joke or an admission. Those are choices an editor can inspect in a passage.
You can begin with a short file:
# Voice
## Diction
[Words and registers that fit; language to avoid.]
## Syntax and rhythm
[How sentences build and turn; punctuation preferences.]
## Examples
[A short passage that sounds right, with an explanation.]
[A rejected passage, with the specific problem identified.]
Ask the agent to infer possible patterns from a few pieces, then correct its reading. It may mistake the subject of one essay for a permanent interest, or elevate a repeated tic into a defining characteristic. You decide which patterns deserve an instruction.
Our AI Style Guides guide goes deeper into using examples and corrections to make your preferences usable.
STYLE.md describes the project’s editorial standards: who the reader is, what the piece promises, what evidence it needs, and how you decide it’s ready.
For Working Overtime, a first-person experience needs to give readers something they can use or understand differently. That is an assignment standard.
Start here:
# Project style
## Purpose and reader
[Who this is for and what it should help them understand or do.]
## Argument and structure
[What a piece needs to establish; useful shapes for this format.]
## Evidence
[Source standards; how to distinguish experience from broader claims.]
## Publication requirements
[Checks, disclosures, and permissions required for this project.]
## Examples
[A successful piece and the editorial choices that make it work.]
Keep the full examples in examples/. Keep notes, sources, versions, and reviews together inside each piece’s folder. The plugin supplies general methods; these files tell the agent what those methods need to accomplish here.
If you maintain several bodies of work, each can have its own standards and examples. A personal column and a technical guide may need different registers, evidence, and structures. A shared voice file is useful for preferences that apply across your projects; a more specific project can have its own guidance. Add this layer when you have a reason to use it.
Describe the outcome you want and let cw-scribe choose a useful route. When you know the job, name the specialist: cw-interview for a live idea, cw-outline for structure, cw-draft for prose, or a focused reviewer for the uncertainty in front of you.
You can also ask for a combination. cw-panel gathers several perspectives; cw-debate lets reviewers respond to one another. Choose the lenses that would help you make a decision, then return to the draft.
These are the skills included in the public Compound Writing package. Each can be invoked on its own. The repository reference carries the current descriptions.
cw-scribe: Choose the smallest useful workflow for starting, continuing, or improving a piece.cw-setup-project: Create a self-contained writing home with voice, style, examples, and drafts.cw-onboarding: Begin or refresh voice and style guides from conversation, examples, or existing context.cw-save: Capture a confirmed preference, editorial lesson, or process improvement in the appropriate file.cw-brainstorm: Surface raw material and possible directions when you don’t have a specific idea yet.cw-interview: Draw out your thinking about a live idea and organize what you say.cw-thesis: Generate possible central claims for you to consider.cw-promise: Generate ways to clarify what the reader will get from the piece.cw-outline: Develop the material into a structure, from a broad sketch to a more detailed outline.cw-hook: Generate opening options suited to the material.cw-transition: Suggest ways to move between ideas or sections.cw-analogy: Generate comparisons that help explain a concept.cw-simplify: Rewrite complex text in plainer language.cw-draft: Turn notes, sources, an outline, or partial prose into a draft.cw-bluf: Find the most important idea and assess whether the opening puts it in the right place.cw-dev-edit: Review the argument, structure, stakes, evidence, and payoff.cw-line-edit: Revise sentences for clarity, rhythm, diction, and economy while preserving meaning and voice.cw-voice-check: Assess voice drift against the active writing context and offer a closer revision.cw-ai-check: Find or remove AI residue, including unsupported additions and formulaic prose.cw-tracks: Find the scaffolding and process narration left behind while the piece was taking shape.cw-final-pass: Assess publication readiness and identify unresolved problems.cw-reader: Read as an intended reader encountering the piece for the first time.cw-objections: Surface counterarguments and credible reader resistance.cw-panel: Gather several reviewer perspectives and synthesize their agreement and disagreement.cw-debate: Have reviewers respond to one another across rounds to work through their disagreements.cw-emergent: Combine skills and available tools for a writing task that no single skill covers.cw-asshole: Apply a hostile, least-charitable read to claims, assumptions, and logic.cw-hemingway: Challenge unnecessary words and demand economy.cw-hitchcock: Examine suspense, tension, and what keeps the reader going.cw-mom: Find where a supportive general reader may become confused or lose the thread.cw-sedaris: Look for opportunities for humor, absurdity, and self-deprecation.cw-sorkin: Examine pacing and momentum.cw-vonnegut: Apply storytelling principles to character, wants, stakes, and purposeful sentences.Start with an idea, notes, an outline, or a draft that already has your attention. You’ll get more useful feedback when you have a real intention against which to judge it.
The Compound Writing repository contains the plugin, its installation instructions, and the complete skill reference. You’ll need Claude Code or Codex with plugin support and access to the folder where you want to write.
In Claude Code, run these commands in the session, one at a time:
/plugin marketplace add EveryInc/compound-writing
/plugin install compound-writing@compound-writing
Start a new session, then select Scribe from the available skills. The commands follow Claude Code’s marketplace installation process.
In Codex, follow the repository’s Codex installation instructions to install the repository as a local plugin. Ask Codex to help with those instructions if you need it. Open a new task in your writing folder and confirm that Compound Writing’s Scribe skill is available before proceeding.
The skill names in this guide use the current cw- prefix: cw-scribe, cw-interview, and so on. You can select the skill in your app or name it in your request.
Open your writing folder and make the current material available to the agent. If your draft is in a connected document, give it that document; otherwise, add a copy to the folder. Tell it who the reader is and what you want the piece to do.
For an existing draft:
Use Compound Writing’s scribe skill on this draft. It’s for [reader], and I want it to help them [purpose]. Read the draft and any existing voice, style, and source files. Identify the most useful next step and begin with a diagnosis. Bring a major change to the central argument back to me before rewriting it.
For a live idea:
Go into interview mode to help me develop this idea: [idea]. Ask about what happened, what I think it means, and what I still need to find out. Keep my answers separate from your suggestions. Don’t draft the piece yet.
Scribe can begin from useful material even if you haven’t built a voice guide. If you want to establish the writing home described above, ask:
Help me establish a writing home in [folder]. Use the Compound Writing setup and onboarding skills. Preserve anything already there. Help me create VOICE.md for how the prose sounds, STYLE.md for what the writing must do, an examples folder, and a drafts folder. Begin with the material I provide and ask about the gaps.
Read what comes back against the job you asked it to do. Be specific when you disagree. “This doesn’t sound like me” is a beginning. “You cut the aside that explains why I was embarrassed” gives the agent a correction it can act on. If the proposed fix changes your claim, stop and work through that choice before generating more prose.
Your first useful session can end with a clearer premise, a better outline, or one revised section. Give yourself something small enough to inspect.
Compounding starts when you notice something you want to carry into the next piece: a revision that made the prose sound more like you, a question that unlocked an idea, or a sequence of reviews that helped you finish. You can capture that lesson while it’s fresh or look back at the end of a session.
Look at the decisions you made together. What did you keep correcting? Which suggestion did you accept, and why? What helped you get unstuck? Ask the agent to review the conversation and draft changes for possible patterns, then judge its suggestions against your own experience.
For example, suppose the agent repeatedly shortens your sentences by cutting the details that set up your jokes. You keep restoring them because the punchlines need details to land.
Explain what to do and why. “Keep my humor” leaves the agent guessing. A more useful instruction would be:
When tightening a sentence with a comic payoff, preserve the details that set up the joke. If those details need to be cut, rewrite the sentence so the payoff still makes sense.
Keep a short before-and-after example with an explanation of what changed. The example should illustrate the principle, so the agent can apply it to new material.
Ask whether the lesson describes your writing generally, this publication or project, or just this piece. Choosing a cooking analogy for one essay doesn’t mean every essay needs cooking metaphors. That choice can stay in the piece’s notes.
VOICE.md: How your sentences sound—rhythm, diction, humor, and sentence construction. The rule about preserving a joke’s setup belongs here.STYLE.md: The project’s editorial standards—argument, evidence, structure, and what the reader should get from a pieceUse cw-save to add a confirmed lesson to the appropriate file in your writing home. It reads the existing guidance and adds or revises the relevant rule. If you’re asking it to infer a lesson, review the proposed wording before it becomes a standing instruction. Once you’ve agreed on the rule, you can say:
Use cw-save to save the rule we just agreed on in this project’s VOICE.md. Include a short example from this draft, check for overlapping guidance, and show me the exact edit and the file you updated.
Check that the file changed. The lesson needs to live in the context future sessions will read.
5. Try it on the next piece
Have the agent read the updated guidance when you start or resume work. When it edits, inspect whether the instruction helped: did it preserve the setup without treating every long sentence as sacred? Refine the rule if it’s too broad, and remove guidance that has stopped serving you.
You don’t need a new rule after every session. Save the lessons you expect to use again, and leave room for your practice to change.
Writing with AI still means taking responsibility for what you publish. Compound Writing gives you more help producing and reviewing a piece. Your judgment determines what earns a place in it.
An agent can suggest a thesis, challenge your reasoning, or offer an interpretation you hadn’t considered. Decide whether you actually agree. You should be able to explain and defend the published argument in your own words, including the parts the model helped develop.
Check quotations, statistics, citations, and consequential claims against their original sources. Read enough surrounding context to know whether the source supports your interpretation. Keep your experience, a source’s findings, and the agent’s inferences distinct. An AI reviewer’s approval is advice, not verification.
Preserve attribution when an agent summarizes or rewrites someone else’s work. Follow your publication’s or client’s rules on AI use and disclosure, and consider what readers need to know to assess the piece. Never present generated quotations, interviews, or observations as reporting you conducted.
Do the work of selecting, checking, and shaping what the model produces before asking someone else to read it. Give readers the context and disclosure they need to judge your claims for themselves.
“Practice” describes both a way of working and the repeated effort through which you develop it. A writing practice includes your methods for finding ideas, shaping arguments, and revising prose. It also involves trying those methods, noticing where they fall short, and getting better at deciding what a piece needs.
Compound Writing gives you a methodology to start from. The practice develops as you use it. Make the process your own by adapting the instructions, keeping the examples that teach you something, and revising the rules you’ve outgrown. The next piece will bring different problems. You’ll meet them with a clearer sense of how you write, where you want to go with an idea—and more ways to help you get there.
Katie Parrott is a staff writer at Every. You can read more of her work in her newsletter. To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.