Hello! I’m Kaushik Viswanath, the new managing editor at Every. In my first week here I’ve had the pleasure of getting to meet much of the Every team, including staff writer Katie Parrott. I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to her work than the latest episode of AI & I, in which she’s interviewed by Every head of consulting Natalia Quintero about how she developed Compound Writing—a sophisticated approach for using AI as a writing partner.—KV

When Katie Parrott was laid off from her job as an editor and ghostwriter at a crypto firm in 2023, she couldn’t afford a career coach. So she signed up for a $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription instead–a decision that turned around her career, and nearly everything else, including her mental health, and the way she approaches writing. Two years later, the Every staff writer has turned that process into an open-source plugin that teaches other writers to think, draft, and edit the way she does.

On this episode of AI & I, Natalia Quintero talks with Katie, staff writer at Every, about how that improvised habit became Compound Writing, the codified writing system—and the plugin behind it—that’s the subject of Katie’s latest guide. It’s a conversation about what happens when you feed a model good ingredients instead of clever prompts, borrow the taste of writers you admire, and let AI handle the grunt work so you can fall back in love with the page.

Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also read the transcript.

Here are the highlights:

• She turned to ChatGPT because she couldn’t afford a real career coach. After a layoff she found traumatizing, Katie turned to ChatGPT to think through her next move. It didn’t hand her answers so much as help her find her own: “Clarity, it turns out, doesn’t arrive gift-wrapped from a digital assistant or even a human coach,” she wrote in the essay that came out of the experience. “It’s something I had to dig out for myself, question by question and prompt by prompt.”
• Good writing starts with good ingredients, not clever prompts. Long before “context engineering” had a name, Katie was feeding ChatGPT the same foundational documents she’d built as a content marketer—audience personas, brand positioning, competitive differentiators—before she ever touched tone or word choice. That groundwork let her take on absurd freelance workloads: In a single two-week stretch, she wrote eight blog posts, three e-books, and dozens of social posts across LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. “The inputs are really what makes the writing unique,” she says. “The model already knows commoditized information—that’s not useful or interesting.”
• Writing with AI made her fall in love with writing again. For years, Katie says, writing felt like “such a slog”—she spent so much energy just assembling sentences that she couldn’t focus on what they actually said. Handing that grunt work to AI freed up the bandwidth for harder, more interesting questions. “Now with AI, I have the energy left over to spend more time wrestling with those harder, bigger-picture questions,” she says. “It’s brought back a feeling of exploration and discovery, both with the tool and with my own brain.”
• She calls it compound writing—and now it’s a plugin anyone can use. Ported from Kieran Klaassen’s compound engineering plugin, Katie’s compound writing system walks any writer through the brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing steps she uses herself, including review “skills” modeled on writers she admires—one based on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of story structure, another on Alfred Hitchcock’s principles of suspense.
• Her thesis: Access will matter more than capability. Ahead of her talk at Thesis, Every’s conference on November 5, Katie warns of the risk that AI’s gains will compound only for those with the time and resources to experiment with the technology. “A much more compelling vision for an AI future,” she says, “is one where everyone is able to come along for the ride.”

Timestamps:

• 0:00 A first look at Compound Writing
• 0:49 Meet Katie Parrott
• 1:27 Turning to ChatGPT after a layoff
• 6:28 How an AI conversation helped Katie say yes to Every
• 8:11 Becoming a one-person content agency with AI
• 11:16 What goes into Katie’s AI context files
• 15:43 Why good AI writing needs your research and experience
• 18:21 How AI made writing fun again
• 21:02 AI’s value beyond productivity
• 23:45 Using agents to tackle emails, appointments, and life admin
• 27:05 Inside Katie’s Codex career coach
• 32:15 Compound Writing: turning feedback into better drafts
• 38:58 Writing lessons from Vonnegut and Hitchcock, built into AI
• 42:45 Catching security flaws in AI-generated code
• 44:49 Who gets to benefit from AI?
• 46:52 Closing thoughts

Miss an episode? Catch up on Dan’s recent conversations with Anthropic head of product Mike Krieger; the team that built Claude Code, Cat Wu and Boris Cherny; the team that built Codex, Thibault Sottiaux and Andrew Ambrosino; Vercel cofounder Guillermo Rauch; podcaster Dwarkesh Patel; and others to learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

Kaushik Viswanath is the managing editor of Every. To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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