How a Professional Writer Writes With AI

Two years ago, Katie Parrott was laid off from a crypto firm and couldn’t afford a career coach—so she turned to a $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription instead.

The Every staff writer’s habit of feeding AI good context eventually became compound writing, a codified system for brainstorming, drafting, and editing with AI. Today, that system is a plugin any writer can use.

On this week’s AI & I, Natalia Quintero talks with Katie about turning good ingredients into good writing, borrowing the taste of writers she admires, and why AI helped her fall back in love with the page.

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Timestamps for YouTube:

0:00 Start0:49 Introduction1:21 How Katie went from being laid off to using ChatGPT as a career coach8:06 Turning AI into a “content agency of one”10:59 Building the context files and style guides that make AI outputs useful14:15 What makes a Claude project actually work21:18 How AI helped with a mental health crisis and “computer errands”27:03 Katie’s career coach, now a fully autonomous Codex project32:27 What compounding means, and building the Compound Writing plugin38:00 Borrowing Vonnegut, Hitchcock, and Sorkin as AI editing skills44:49 Katie’s thesis: education and access will matter more than ever

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Katie Parrott on X: @kplikethebird

Compound writing plugin: ⁠https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-writing

Compound engineering plugin (Kieran Klassen): github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Parrott’s companion piece on compound writing: https://every.to/guides/compound-writing

Parrott, “I Hired ChatGPT as My Career Coach”: every.to/working-overtime/i-hired-chatgpt-as-my-career-coach

Parrott, “AI Turned Me Into a Content Agency of One”: every.to/working-overtime/ai-turned-me-into-a-content-agency-of-one