How a Professional Writer Writes With AI

Introduction to Katie Parrott

0:00Hey, it's Dan Shipper, and this week I'm excited to share a very special episode of AI and 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 Classen'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.

0:49Today we're talking to Katie Parrott, staff writer at Every. Katie, if you've been following Every for a while now, will be very familiar to you. She's one of our all-star writers, and we're so excited to learn more about her writing process and her new plugin today. Hi, Katie. How are you? I'm good. How are you? So good. I am so excited for this conversation. I am revealing myself as a Katie fangirl on the podcast.

1:22It's a mutual fandom.

Using ChatGPT as a Career Coach

1:23Um, thank you. Okay, so Katie, almost exactly two years ago, you wrote one of your most popular pieces for Every, and it was about how you had just been laid off, and also maybe were in the middle of a mental health crisis, which you've written publicly about, and you decided to turn to ChatGPT as a career coach. Um, but at the time, you were also an AI skeptic, which, uh, might be crazy to think about now, given some of the work that you're doing.

1:58But can you take us back to that period? What was going on in your career, and in that moment in time, that led you to turn to ChatGPT in the first place? Yeah, so I had just been let go from a crypto firm where I was working as an editor and ghostwriter for the, for the team. Uh, and, you know, that in, like, in hindsight, like, it was traumatizing at the time, but in hindsight, it was, like, the best thing that ever happened to me because it led me back to Every. Uh, and, but I was feeling really lost, as you mentioned, you know, like, I had, like, tried crypto, I had tried, um, you know, in-house, I had tried out-of-house, like, I had tried all these different things, and I felt like I was at the end of what I could do on my own, and I really needed an outside perspective.

2:45But because I was working on a budget with no, not, no clear visibility into how long I would be unemployed, hiring a, a real career coach wasn't really an option for me. So I had some exposure to ChatGPT at that time. Um, I had actually used it, uh, to produce briefs at a previous job as a content marketing manager. We had an agency, and I realized, and I was, I was, like, hitting a wall of depression at that job, and, like, could not bring myself to put words on a page.

3:17But I found that if I used ChatGPT to generate some of the repetitive stuff, um, and, uh, it became this assistive tool that, um, I used as a tool for thought, um, which was a phrase I'd also seen Dan use, uh, around this same time, because I was, I was following Every at the time. Um, and so it was kind of that combination of things where I was, like, okay, I can't afford, like, $150 an hour, however much, uh, a career coach would be, but I can sign up for a $20 a month ChatGPT subscription.

3:49And, you know, and get some of that same result of externalizing my thinking and getting an outside perspective and, um, just holding me accountable for, um, what, how I was thinking about my, my career journey, um, and challenging me when I would get a little, like, I have a tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst. And it kind of took me out of myself in that way, too. And it was just, like, a really great experience, uh, for me, uh, and, like, kind of, and it ultimately led me to every, so, yeah.

4:29Yeah, uh, it's such a cool post that you wrote. And you have, you just always have such great zingers in your writing that are just so delightful to read. Uh, I hope when we are sharing this on video, we can pull up some of the screenshots of just what your ChatGPT prompts and screenshots look like, because it feels vintage to be looking at, you know, chat from two, two and a half years ago. Uh, but in that post, you have this really great quote.

5:01Uh, it's a little lengthy, but I'm going to try to read it because I have a question about it. So, you say, one of my favorite things about writing is that I never know what I think until I write it down. But once I write it down, it becomes obvious. Ultimately, what's prompting ChatGPT is a form of very specific strategic writing. Do I think my experiment with ChatGPT added clarity in my thinking? Yes, it has. But as with so many of these tools, the real work is still mine. Clarity, it turns out, doesn't arrive gift-wrapped from a digital assistant or even a human coach.

5:34It's something I had to dig out for myself, question by question, and prompt by prompt. True clarity, direction, and answers come from the process of engaging with the prompts and doing the hard work yourself. AI can help guide the way, but the journey is yours to take. Just so beautiful. Just so, so cool. And, you know, I think one of the things that really resonates with me about your writing is that this feels so reflective of my experience using AI, where I am attracted to the possibility of maybe an easy answer, an easy solve.

6:13But actually, what I constantly find myself doing is learning something that was always there inside of me, but I had to put some work in and some clarity into to, like, actually get it out of me. Can you tell me a little bit more about what using AI in this very early experience and this very kind of practical, high-value experience, what it taught you about using AI? The first thing it taught me is that I can use AI to make change in my life,

6:46which is something that I've continued to carry through over the last couple of years. You know, I really judge the technology by the impact it's had practically for me. And, you know, the fact that I, you know, used the career coach, for example, I remember talking when I, like, got the invitation from Kate to write what ultimately became Working Overtime, my column. I was, you know, talking to ChatGPT about whether it was the right step for me to take because, you know, I was kind of on the fence.

7:21It would have been freelancing at the time. I was kind of on the fence about that versus looking for a full-time opportunity. And ChatGPT nudged me in the direction of, like, well, why not try it in the meantime? And I did that, and now I'm here. And throughout my experience with AI, that's really been the thing is that it's given me both the framework for thinking, and obviously it's become the thing I think about, but it's really just about the fruits of the labor, so to speak,

7:56and seeing what AI is able to give back to me. So it sounds like one of the early takeaways that you had in leveraging AI was that you could really get it to be a valuable tool for you.

Scaling Content Production with AI

8:11And so that reminds me of another post that you wrote that was really popular with the Every Audience, and I believe it's titled, AI turned me into a content agency of one. And early in this post, you talk about how at the time you were a freelancer, so this is early 2025, and you realize that you had overcommitted yourself, or potentially overcommitted yourself, with the number of freelance projects that you had agreed to deliver.

8:45And then you go on to list the number of things that you had committed to delivering in a two-week period. This includes eight blog posts, three e-books, 24 LinkedIn posts, we're not even halfway through, 24 X posts, 16 Instagram posts. I mean, there is just no way I could write this amount of content in a month. How did you learn to do that? How did you learn to use AI to generate this amount of content,

9:16and at the caliber that I know you deliver? I think around this time was when I was really discovering, like, I wouldn't have used this language because it hadn't really become a thing yet, but context engineering. And what I realized was if I gave the model a really good foundation in terms of, you know, the brand messaging, product specifics, audience specifics of the companies that I was working for, I could shape the AI outputs toward the direction that I wanted.

9:50So it was really a lot of foundational work that once that was set, I could kind of just, like, iterate through. And it helped that a lot of the things were, like, content repurposing, which is one of the first things that people were really excited about. You know, one of the first products that Evry put out was Spiral, which was all about content repurposing, because that's something that Evry was doing a lot. You know, you have a post, you want to turn it into a LinkedIn post, a blog, you know, a Twitter post, a blog post. And so, yeah, it was just like, I realized, I was like, okay,

10:22I'll write through all of the surrounding information that the AI needs to do a good job. And then, like, the more I put in that work up front, the easier the process got farther down the line. And that's something that I found with my AI experience overall, is just, like, you invest in it. Like, at first, it feels really effortful, and you're spending a lot of time, you know, setting the seams, like, getting everything lined up, like, in terms of your tools and your integrations and your context documents.

10:53But when you have that environment set up, you can just kind of run and, like, run fast. And that's what I was able to do when I overcommitted myself at that time, which I did again, like, six months later. I think this might be a common characteristic of everyone at MRA.

11:16Can we talk a little bit more about what was in those files and in the context and in the setup that you created to let you run fast? Because I think I remember some of the context files that you shared with us and that I saw, you know, around that time. But I'm curious, like, what does that look like? Were they folders that you were sharing? Were they projects on Claude? Like, walk me through what some of those things looked like.

Building Context and Project Workflows

11:45They weren't projects because projects didn't exist yet. And I remember at the time, like, at the time projects launched, I thought back to that period. I was like, I really wish that this had existed when I was doing this because I had to do a lot of manual copy and pasting. Like, I would have my persistent documents and I would just, in a Google Doc, and I would copy and paste into the context window so that the agent, so that it wasn't an agent. Well, I guess maybe it was an agent. I don't know. But so that the model would have access to that information. And it really came from my experience in the content marketing world

12:19building style guides. You know, every brand worth its salt has, you know, a source of truth where they document, okay, who is our audience? What are their pain points? How does our product map to those pain points? You know, what is our competition and what are our differentiators? Like, these are units of sort of work that I was used to doing as a content manager. And so that, I just started with what I was familiar with.

12:52I started with what I knew and gave that information to the model. And it, like, it did a good job. So I was, at that point, I was like, okay, this seems to be working. And then, you know, projects came along. And I did, so suddenly I didn't have to copy paste anymore because I could use the project documents. And I could use the custom instructions to sort of set a project up. And I had a project for every freelance client. I had a project for every column that I worked on

13:24because I was starting to spread out in terms of what I was doing at every at that time. But it all comes down to basic rules of writing and knowing who is our audience. You know, what is our differentiated thing that we have to say? And just feeding the AI all of that foundational stuff so that it feels, so that it kind of has rails to run on. That's what I'm always, I always think of

13:54is just, like, creating guardrails and kind of, like, a fenced-in place for the model to play. And then you don't have to, like, worry so much about getting something that's completely wrong because you're kind of pushing it in the right direction. Right. You've given it a playground. I know this is something that Mike Taylor on our team cares a lot about, you know, having really clean context windows and being very selective of what playground you're giving model.

14:26Knowing what you know now and as a writer, what are, you know, what are the things that you think have made it so that your projects are so successful? Is it having a really strong point of view on what good writing is, on what good content marketing is? Like, what are those things that are so important to have a strong perspective on? I think it's less about the writing at first than it is about the other kinds of context,

15:00like, the data that you're giving it, the frameworks for, like, audience personas and who they should be talking to. Like, you need all of that in place before you can even get to stuff like, use these words and avoid these words. Like, prefer this level of reading difficulty and, like, strike this tone. Like, before you even get to the point where you're sort of messing with that kind of stuff,

15:30you need to have those foundational elements kind of set up. And then, like, we'll be wrestling with this diction and syntax thing for the rest of forever, so.

15:43And when you're referring to the data, what is the data that you would need to put in there? Well, that's the specifics of the piece. So, like, something that I feel really strongly about it, like, as, like, our role as humans in this wonderful world of AI and AI writing specifically is that there's sort of a last mile problem in writing, in AI and writing, which is AI has that knowledge cut off, right? It's always working with data that's, you know, several months out of date.

16:15And our job as the humans is to close that last mile and provide the real-world experiences that AI can't get because they come after the knowledge cut off and it's also out there happening somewhere in the real world and AI is not in the real world, the physical world, yet. So, when I say research, I'm really talking about the unique, or data, it's, like, the unique insights. So that whether that's, like, a study that your company has produced or third-party research that you're pulling in,

16:48which is something that I love to do in my writing for working overtime, it's all of the constitutive elements that go into the writing and the model can then work from that. But, like, it's the inputs are really what makes the writing unique. I think a lot of times when people are writing with AI, they just kind of go with to it and say, write a blog post about style guides. Let's just use that as an example. And they don't give it anything to go on.

17:20They're just, like, write a style guide, a post about style guides based on what you, the model, already know. But what the model already knows is commoditized information. Like, that's not useful or interesting. So the data is the unique insight, the data point that the model doesn't have access to yet, the personal experience, all of those things that are ultimately going to make the writing unique. It almost sounds like the documents

17:51that you save for what might be a project today or what might be maybe like a codex sort of setup is all of the things that can be codified as, like, good best practices. But then what you bring into every piece, it's like the quality of the ingredients, right? So it sounds like what you're bringing to the piece is just the sort of, like, freshness, quality, and unique elements of the piece that you want to highlight and bring out that only you can really bring.

18:21I love that analogy. That's a really good one. That's pretty much exactly it. You know, the model is the kitchen. The, you know, the, you know, like, structure, like, the outline is, like, chopping and the composition is, like, boiling but, like, you need the, you need the individual ingredients to be, like, fresh and, and, like, good to produce good work. Yeah. This is actually something

18:52that you reference very early on in this piece in 2025. You have this really beautiful quote and I'm sorry to read you your great quotes back to you. It's horrifying. So, you write, two odd years into my AI journey, I have to admit, AI hasn't just helped me produce content faster. It has fundamentally changed the scale of what I can do. The limits of what I used to bump up against time, energy, capacity are way lower. And it sounds like

19:22that's the recipe, right? It's like you would always be using the same recipe, but now you don't have to worry so much about the recipe. The recipe is codified. Now you can really just come to the table with, like, what is uniquely in your brain. This is something that you also say in the post. It's become trite to say that AI frees you to focus on the human elements that truly matter. But AI has freed me to focus on the human elements that truly matter. I remember that one.

19:51It's magic seeing it from the outside, you know, like, I have no idea how you do it and it's magical every time that you put another piece together. It's magical to me, too. Like, that's really all I can say is, like, the fact, like, working with AI kind of made me fall in love with writing again because for a long time writing to me had just felt like such a slog. It was, like, so effortful. I was spending so much, like, energy and mental

20:22capacity just trying to assemble sentences that I wasn't really paying attention to what the sentences as a whole said or, like, like, or, like, I was just, like, this is done. I'm going to get it off my plate. It's good enough. And now with AI, I have, like, the energy left over to spend more time wrestling with those harder, bigger picture questions. And it's just made writing a lot more fun because it's brought back a feeling of exploration

20:52and discovery both with the tool but then also with my own brain and what I think and, like, how I bring that to life. So I want to turn back a moment to, you know, there's two things that I admire so much in the way that you use AI specifically. And one is obviously the way in which you use it for writing but the other is the way in which you use it kind of, like, as a harness for doing your best work.

21:24And you have this really beautiful piece that you wrote in about a year ago so kind of, like, mid-2025 called AI Solved the Problem That I Couldn't Explain to Managers. And in this piece you talk about how, or actually can you tell us a little bit about this piece do you remember what you talked about? You hear a lot about AI tools on this show but the one that's truly at the center of your work is your CRM.

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Managing Mental Health and Inbox Anxiety

22:42This is the piece where I talk about my mental health and my crippling anxiety around email. Yeah, so this is a piece that this is this is like one of the most personal and like one of my favorite pieces that I wrote because it's about AI viewed through a different lens that I think we're used to talking to thinking about it. You know, we think about AI as a productive technology, right? we value it for its ability to produce output and get things out of our like just put stuff

23:13out and what I found in my personal experience is that AI is just as powerful as a supportive technology. So, you know, I have bipolar disorder, I experience spikes of like high energy and honestly, frankly, I spend a lot more time in really lows of depression and what I found is that AI kind of reduces friction in my life in a way that like makes it easier for me to person. It makes it easier for me to work, it makes it easier for me to,

23:43you know, move through my day-to-day life. That's actually become even more true now with agents being able to like handle what our COO Brandon calls computer errands. So like, you know, I put off making a primary care physician appointment for like three years and then I realized I could simply tell Codex to go find primary care physicians near me that like take my insurance and are accepting new patients and it went off and found me someone

24:14and I booked an appointment and that's something that I would never have done. I would have just kept procrastinating on it infinitely because of the way my brain works and AI was able to help me over that hump and it's done that over and over again. So like, you know, using Quora to make my inbox more manageable so I'm not confronting a wall of emails but just the really important ones that need my human response that's completely changed my relationship to my inbox because I

24:44don't have to like go digging and like be like looking for the bomb that is hiding in the millions of like things that are just like subscription notices and stuff but like the things that need human response has come to me and like now I have an automation set up through Codex to like tell and I have it tell me what's in my inbox that I need to that I need to respond to and so like my like inbox anxiety has been completely resolved and I've just seen a lot of other ways that

25:15that AI supports me and allows me to work better not just in terms of like using it for the output but using it for everything that surrounds the output right it's like it's not just the medical appointments it's the bills it's the emails it's the tasks that you know you'll never really get around to doing like around the house or whatever it might be and it does feel to me with AI that I have a little bit more firepower to get

25:45to some of those things you'll love this Katie for the first time in my life I'm filing insurance reimbursements because Codex is filing my insurance reimbursements I would rather pay insurance than have to manually do that and it's exciting to have a tool that I feel like can really work in my favor in this particular piece you know you talk about that and you say I've been working at Avery for one year now

26:16and that might not sound remarkable but it feels like a milestone for me the proof of AI's value is the fact that I'm still here doing work I'm proud of and you know it kind of is the greatest measure of success that you get to do more of the work that you're excited to wake up and do every day and you know that to me that's such a clear AI win can you tell us a little bit more about you know so we started out with you going to ChatTBT you know over two years ago and asking

26:46it to be your AI coach and it's enabled this incredible amount of work that you're doing now you've talked about it in some posts now it looks a little bit more like a codex project if I believe can you tell us a little bit more about like how that has evolved and what that looks like today my writing process for this is for the kind of like career like what the equivalent of like your career

Evolution into Codex and Voice Agents

27:10coach looks like today oh my gosh my career coach has evolved so much it is now a project inside of my codex and it has so much more information than the first version so it has it has a dossier on me and my role and it has context around every and our like you know super top secret brand positioning that I got from our head of

27:41marketing Douglas that I was like okay if we put and then what I'm able to do with that is like okay here's the context on me and my role here's the context on every how do I put those two things together and what should I prioritize to have the biggest impact that I can and so it helps me now now that I'm in a job and not looking not needing the career coach to help me find a job it helps me orient myself prioritize it does project management for me

28:12and now increasingly all of this is happening just with voice like with monologue I monologue like a ton all day every day and I'll just like talk to my career coach about like I've got four different priorities like what should I what should I what should I do in what order and it kind of operates as that chief of staff that kind of like points me in a direction and says this is the highest impact thing you can do first this is like maybe something that you can

28:42put off until later and then that like and it just helps do that kind of that kind of work and it maintains a Kanban board for me I've never been a person that can maintain a Kanban board but now I don't even have to touch it it just lives in this little career coach management project land and I just like say like what's like what's the due date on this deliverable and it will tell me can you tell us a little bit more how that how that set up that sounds incredible so like that's the

29:13thing is you kind of forget over time as it starts to work you just take for granted that it's working and you don't think about what's inside it so much anymore so let me find career coach mode yeah so it's got evidence is one of the folders so you know I periodically scrape all the data out of our content management system into a spreadsheet and like I have that so I know like how my posts are performing it also has like reader feedback and other

29:43things like I maintain what I call my validation folder which is just full of nice things people have said about my work that becomes another input because that helps the model understand okay what do people respond positively to in my work that we want to like reinforce it has references like that's where my my role positioning is the it has my OKRs for Q2 and now Q3 because somehow it became Q3 which should not be legal and some

30:14other things like that so it just has it just has a ton of these again it's all context it's all documentation that increasingly I don't manually create I have AI created for me like through an interview process like I'm I'm always having AI interview me Alex Duffy gave me that tip early on in my time at every and it just like completely changed how I work with AI because I'll just be like ask me questions to draw out what I think about this and that's how I was able to pull together the career coaches like I just

30:46said I want to create a career coach you know this is what I wanted to do and then I started just showing it a bunch of context documents like all of the the data from the the performances and like my validation folder and we just talked until we got to a place where we had a system that worked the way that I

31:05in my mind so in in two years which is you know a lot of time in AI time but in two years you went from prompting a simple prompt on chat tpt you know how can you help me as a career coach to having a fully autonomous codex setup that maintains your to-do list your OKRs it keeps you on track of the Kanban board and at this point your codex is maintaining it for

31:36you is that insane so I mean this is amazing right I think one of the things that you are uniquely great at is using AI for you know kind of like powering your career harness and also your ability to write really great pieces and so going back to the writing component you know we talked a little bit about some of the how you've created AI to basically kind of like hold

32:07the recipe for you like how you think about good writing and then the elements that you bring to each writing session so that it can just allow you to do your best work and now you are I think by the time that this podcast airs we will have published your compound writing plugin can you tell us a little bit about what compounding is as a concept and then about the

32:37writing plugin yeah

The Compound Writing Plugin

32:39so

The Compound Writing Plugin

32:40compounding is the idea that every piece of feedback that you give to AI should feed back into the system to improve the next output so obviously for folks that follow every they'll be familiar with this from Kieran Claussen's compound engineering plugin he was really the one to pioneer this idea that you should only have to give a piece of feedback once but and if you codify it the right way it will be there forever and the next time you're in that same situation the AI is

33:11going to make a better decision and so the compound writing plugin it started like I literally just forked forked is a word that I know now because I wouldn't have known if I weren't working with AI but I pulled the compound engineering plugin down and talked to Claude and said I want to take this compound engineering plugin and adapt it for writing because in certain ways writing is very similar to code like the

33:41compound engineering plugin has brainstorming ideating planning working and then reviewing and very similarly in writing you have brainstorming outlining drafting reviewing and it's kind of a similar kind of flow but there are also differences like obviously I don't need my you know for writing you're not looking at things like coding

34:12conventions you're looking for things like structure voice evidence and like all of these kinds of different things so it's a different container but it just made sense to me so again I just talked to Claude and said I want these steps in the process I want an outline to look like this I want a draft to be done this way and these are the kinds of reviews like

34:43a substantive edit that's the big picture structure and the argument and then a line edit that looks at the individual writing and a final pass that looks at the final details that you want something to be publication ready and I was able to pull that together just like all of my best AI ideas I've ripped off from someone else on the every team so it was very much compound engineering plus Dan's agent native architecture guide that kind of combined together to create compound writing and now

35:14that's what I use all the time for every piece that I write I'm no longer in a chat window I'm no longer in a project on claude.ai or chatgbt.com I am like in the claude desktop app or the chatgbt desktop app working with this system that has all that again has the recipe of how I want the drafting process to go and then it has the context files about still many

35:45of the same context files that used to live in the project in terms of a style guide example pieces and then again I just bring the fresh information into that ecosystem and a piece comes out of it one way or another somehow a piece appears I'm so excited to use it when it becomes available I hope to be an alpha tester of it when you're ready to share it oh it's on the github you can get it

36:16now if you're on the github dang okay great I will definitely have to try it one of the things that I find so exciting about a great plug-in a great plug-in to me is like an expert instruction manual for how to do something you have no business doing and and so for compound engineering I am not an engineer by trade and yet I spend my weekend building different products and products

36:46that I rely on now every day and what compound engineering allows me to do is to build a product using the logic and as practices that a great engineer and actually a great team of engineers would use four different steps in the product build process obviously it begins with something like a PRD or plan things are scoped really well there's security element obviously there's compounding at the end but this is a process that

37:17if you are not an engineer or an expert at building products it's just totally foreign to you right so in the same way that when you were describing the things that you would intuitively create as context files for your cloud projects over a year or two ago now it's like I can access Katie's brain recipe with this compound writing plugin where I can both use the tool and

37:47the tool can help me do better work but I think what's most exciting about a great plugin to me is that it can teach you how to do that kind of work right so it can teach you how to be a great writer because it presents the steps the options and the different directions that you might take at any step do you find that for writing in particular because it's not so deterministic in the way that code is that it's a

38:21professional writers I

Borrowing Frameworks from Writers

38:23definitely think people can use it who are not professional writers and it may even be better for them because they don't have strong pre-existing opinions about the writing and so they're going to be less inclined to nitpick and they'll just be excited to like that they can produce something that they maybe hadn't been able to produce before but and I think that and honestly I think and I wrote about this in a piece for for

38:53working over time like writing with AI is harder than you think it's made me a better writer like the analogy that I use for the compound writing plugin is that it's a gym it's a workout system to make you a better writer because most of the so like for example in the editing step I built in a lot of these reviewers one of my favorites is Vonnegut so Kurt Vonnegut had these like eight elements of story structure so it's things like start as close to the end as possible you

39:23know every sentence has to earn its place give the reader a character they can root for and I just turned that into a skill in the plugin and now you can borrow this framework it's not like Kurt Vonnegut the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut is reviewing your work but he has this framework that I think is really useful for a lot of writers that you can kind of distill and turn into a skill and I've done that with several different writers that I admire so another one I have is Hitchcock

39:53which is based on Hitchcock's principle of suspense so he has this famous quote about a bomb under the table where if there's a bomb under the table and it explodes that's one moment of surprise but if you have people sitting around the table and you show the audience the bomb under the table and say this bomb will go off in five minutes now you have five minutes of suspense and so I turn that into a skill that assesses okay does this make

40:24the reader lean in

40:31lens that you can apply to writing and so I get a lot of value out of that as an experienced writer even because I'm not always able to consider all of those different lenses but now I can just sort of invoke Vonnegut invoke Hitchcock invoke Sorkin invoke Sedaris for humor and get those kinds of perspectives on my writing that are informed by these really brilliant storytellers that I

41:01it's such a gift it's so cool that you've done this I mean I could totally see how you know presented with the opinions of Sorkin and Sedaris and Vonnegut someone might say oh I really like Vonnegut like that's a framework that really resonates with me and maybe that is closer to the writing style that I aspire to have and might pursue or equally helpful I don't like the Hitchcock you know sort of like method of writing or sort of like this leaning in and

41:32that's what actually would enable you to develop your own taste which I think is really what any ambitious AI user wants to do right it's like we want to do things that we have no business doing right building products that we have that we wouldn't have been able to build 10 years ago

41:57of a caliber that like we would be proud of but it's actually really difficult to do high quality work and it takes a lot of effort there's really kind of no shortcut but with a plugin like the compound writing plugin it gives you something to react to it gives you so much more to react to that you can either agree or disagree with and that can make you better writer so

42:27it is a gift especially coming from you and I think it really informs this new chapter that we're in AI which is we're getting expertise that is codified that allows more people to do more great things which is just so exciting yeah and I'm benefiting from that on my end I also use compound engineering to do things that I have no business doing sometimes that gets me in trouble but then AI gets me out of trouble

42:58as well so I wrote one of my most recent pieces for working overtime was about how I accidentally coded a security risk into a product that I had built I had built an MCP into this app I made called Tastemaker that actually lets you pull clips from different writing you admire and distills that into a style guide this is what you admire and appreciate in writing that you might want to inform your own pieces and I built an

43:28MCP because I want to be able to add new clips and pull my style guide down without actually having to go to the app just while I'm in Codex or Claude and I built it and I don't think I had the most up-to-date compound engineering plugin that had more robust security features

43:53Codex was like there are five security vulnerabilities here so AI got me in the trouble and AI got me out of the trouble but the fact that I'm here building these kinds of products I built my website that's crazy it's crazy that I'm able to do that but all I have to do is borrow Kieran's brain and I can do it well I borrow Kieran's brain and I'm excited to be borrowing your brain so thank you thank

44:24you for putting it out there

Thesis on AI Education and Access

44:25Katie you've been on this journey for really over two years now you know all the way from starting to use chat dpt as a career coach to now having codex not just helping you run your work day to day but now having built your own custom writing plugin it's such an incredible journey that you've been on and in a few months you'll be speaking at the every conference thesis on November 5th

44:56at Pioneer Works in front of so many executives and leaders in the AI space what is your thesis on AI today my thesis on AI today is that education and access are going to matter more than they ever have before so something I feel very strongly about is the distribution of opportunity I am based in Columbus Ohio I grew up in the Midwest I

45:27haven't really spent time in New York or SF or Austin and all these big tech hubs but I believe really strongly that this technology should be in the hands of as many people as possible but in order for that to happen you have to create the right conditions so I'm very fortunate in the fact

45:48to really great thinkers and I can learn from Kieran I can learn from Dan I can learn from you but all of that has been facilitated by the fact that I have a certain amount of economic comfort I have a certain amount of free time to and budget to experiment with these tools and get a subscription and vibe code until 2am if that's what's interesting to me and I think that what I want to challenge the AI community with

46:18is thinking about how we can expand those kinds of opportunities to more people and more kinds of people in more different places because AI does have this huge multiplicative capacity and this compounding capacity but the risk there is that that value is going to compound to this small subset of people that happen to be early and I just think that a much more compelling vision for an AI future is one where everyone is able to come along for the ride I

46:49aspire to that version of the future thank you so much Katie it's been such a treat to connect today so excited to have the public release of the compound writing plugin and thank you for your time thanks for having me this was fun oh my gosh folks you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI

47:19and I why because this show is the epitome of awesomeness it's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard but instead of gold it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT every episode is a rollercoaster of emotions insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more it's not just a show it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship so do yourself a favor hit like smash subscribe and strap in

47:50for the ride of your life and now without any further ado let me just say Dan I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you