I'm a writer, not a software developer. Yet this year I built Compound Writing, an AI system that guides a writer through every stage of a piece: interview, outline, draft, critique, and polish. Building it took two kinds of expertise. One was knowing how good writing gets made, which I'd spent my career learning. The other was knowing how to structure AI agents so they improve with every piece of work, which I didn’t know the first thing about.
So I borrowed it. My colleague Kieran Klaassen had built Compound Engineering, a system for coding with AI agents in which every lesson learned makes the next task easier. I took his structure (plan, work, review, and codify what you learned) and adapted it for the kinds of checkpoints and tools a writer could use. Kieran’s expertise escaped his job description and landed in mine.
After automation, more of us will start installing one another's expertise. Some of what took years to learn will become something we can pass along to others.
The catch is that someone has to do the translating. An editor's sense that a draft isn't working has to become something an agent can act on. An engineer's hunch about where a project will go wrong has to become a check the system knows to run. Experts will have to get much better at explaining themselves, which, as someone who has written, “Say more?” in 1,000 margins, I find deeply satisfying. Shared as a plugin, those instructions let an agent apply an expert’s methods for someone they’ve never met.
It can also feel like an unfair trade: years of practice reduced to someone else’s shortcut. But I believe in a karmic law of skill-sharing. The more useful methods we make available, the more we all have to draw from. That’s the loop I want to help build: I share what I know about writing, someone else shares what they know about engineering, and we each become capable of more than we could manage alone.
