Transcript: 'How an Every Staff Writer Developed Compound Writing'

The transcript of AI & I with Every staff writer Katie Parrott, hosted by Natalia Quintero, is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:00:49
2. How Katie went from being laid off to using ChatGPT as a career coach: 00:01:21
3. Turning AI into a “content agency of one”: 00:08:06
4. Building the context files and style guides that make AI outputs useful: 00:10:59
5. What makes a Claude project actually work: 00:14:15
6. How AI helped with a mental health crisis and “computer errands”: 00:21:18
7. Katie’s career coach, now a fully autonomous Codex project: 00:27:03
8. What compounding means, and building the Compound Writing plugin: 00:32:27
9. Borrowing Vonnegut, Hitchcock, and Sorkin as AI editing skills: 00:38:00
10. Katie’s thesis: education and access will matter more than ever: 00:44:49

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Hey, it’s Dan Shipper, and this week I’m excited to share a very special episode of AI & I. In this episode, we’re previewing the release of an experimental new plugin called Compound Writing, which helps you write with AI the way that we do internally. It’s inspired by Kieran Klaassen’s Compound Engineering, and it’s built by one of our staff writers, Katie Parrott.

To help talk about this plugin and why Katie made it and how she uses it, Natalia Quintero is the host of this episode. She’s our head of AI consulting, and she’s been on the podcast a few times, and she’s just an incredible interviewer. So I’m really excited for you to hear Katie and Natalia chat.