I wrote it

I don’t like the idea of having AI write articles and blog posts, especially when they relate to personal stories. But I think they can still be useful. I wanted to leverage the tool while still writing the post myself.

Rubber Ducky

The first thing I did was tell Claude that I wanted to write a blog post about how I was using AI in our .NET modernization effort. More specifically, I said:

I’d like some help writing a blog post. I don’t want you to do any of the writing. I wanna do is just get my thoughts out about the topic that I wanna write about. And then I’d like you to take a look at it And come up with what you think would be a good organization and outline. For the actual blog post. So that I can go back and actually write what I wanna write.

My prompt had terrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But that’s because I was using speech to text and I didn’t bother correcting it. I figured if it couldn’t handle a simple, poorly phrased prompt like that, it was never going to be able to handle a multi-minute recitation of the story I wanted to tell.

The Outline

Claude churned for a minute and then came back with an outline… that I didn’t bother reading. That’s because as it was putting the outline together, I noticed that I had the video with the /grill-me skill still open in my browser, which got me thinking. When I had the ability to prompt Claude again I said this:

Actually, before I review that outline that you created, could you act as an interviewer for a magazine or newspaper? Interested in writing about this topic? And just ask me questions about the process that I could answer 1 by 1. Will help me kind of organize my thoughts. And help you potentially come up with a better outline.

Getting Grilled

This part was awesome! It asked me questions that forced me to think deeply about specific aspects of my story that I hadn’t considered. I would get a new perspective on other parts of the story. It helped me suss out some of the key points that I originally glossed over. And honestly, it made me feel like someone worth interviewing which put me in a frame of mind that I don’t know if I’ve been in before. I think if I’d set the agent up to actually speak it would have completed the illusion. One step at a time, though.

It asked me 10 questions and they would build off previous questions. When I told it that I felt like I’d probably set my initial attempts up for failure, it asked what had changed and asked me to think if there was a specific moment that triggered the change. This was all information that I had in me but it was helping to extract it, which I don’t think I’d have been able to do on my own.

The Outline… Again

This time I actually read the outline that it came back with. I used it as a starting point but even as I wrote out the section headers, I was renaming things and moving things around. When I had the sections laid out, I grabbed a cup of coffee, put on some music, and started typing. Now that I had the framework laid out and a ton of ideas swirling in my head, I could just flow. And when I would hit a spot where I didn’t know how to phrase something, I would go back to the agent window and look at what I’d originally said. That would be my guide and would get me moving again. This was probably the most straightforward part of the whole process.

Letters to the Editor

When I had my first draft done, I decided to try to use Claude as a newspaper or magazine editor. I pasted my document into the agent and prompted it with:

I would like you to take on the persona of a newspaper or magazine editor and review what I’ve written. I do NOT want you to rewrite it. I would like constructive criticism on how I’ve presented the topics, discussed my experience, and how it all connects. I would like you to pay special attention to writing patterns that I lean on too heavily, cliches I may have used, and other writing issues that may make the article more confusing.

I expected it to focus on the cliches and writing style, but I was surprised when it told me that I’d lost some of the emotion that was in the original interview. It said I was doing too much hedging, softening the point of the article. Sure, it mentioned cliches and a few of my other writing quirks that didn’t serve any literary purpose but I felt like that lack of emotion hit me hardest.

Round and Round

I did a few rounds of edits like that: I would make some adjustments and send it back for more comments. I went through maybe four rounds of that before I was happy with the results. I did everything in a single chat, so the “reviewer” had the full context including the original interview. I think this produced a better edit because it was able to compare what I wrote with what I said.

Conclusion

I really like this workflow, and I’m going to use it in the future. I didn’t use AI at all for this article and I’m curious if you can tell the difference.

Postscript

After I finished writing this post, I went looking to see if anyone else had written about this kind of workflow. It turns out Elio Struyf had beaten me to it with Getting interviewed by AI to write your technical content or blog posts. I hadn’t read his piece before writing mine, but it’s a good companion read if you want another take on the same idea.