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Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.
For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.
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 Klassen'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, thing.
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.
Today we're talking to Katie Parrott,
staff writer at Ebery.
Katie, if you've been following Ebery for
a while now, we'll 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.
It's a mutual fandom.
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 we're in the middle of a
mental health crisis, which you've written
publicly about.
And you decided to turn to chat TBT as a
career coach.
But at the time you were also an AI
skeptic, which might be crazy to think about now
given some of the work that you're doing.
But 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 chat tbt 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 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 I had tried
crypto, I had tried in
-house, I had tried out -of -house, 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 but because I was
working on a budget with no clear visibility
into how long I would be unemployed,
hiring a real career coach wasn't really an
option for me.
So I had some exposure to chatgbt at that
time.
I had actually used it to produce briefs
at a previous job as a content marketing
manager.
We had an agency and I realized,
I was like hitting a wall of depression at
that job and like could not bring myself
to put words on a page.
But I found that if I used chatgbt to
generate some of the repetitive stuff
And it became this assistive tool that I
used as a tool for thought, which is a
phrase I'd also seen Dan use around the
same time because I was following every at
the time.
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 a
career coach would be, but I can sign up
for a $20 a month ChatGPT subscription.
and get some of that same result of
externalizing my thinking and
getting an outside perspective and just
holding me accountable for
how I was thinking about my career journey
and challenging me when I would get a
little,
like I have a tendency to catastrophize
and the worst and it kind of took me out of
myself in that way too and it was just
like a really great experience for me
and like kind of and it ultimately led me
to every so yeah.
Yeah 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.
I hope when we are sharing this on video
we can pull up some of the screenshots of
just what your chat DPT prompts and
screenshots look like because it feels vintage
to be looking at chat from two and a half
years ago.
But in that post you have this really
great quote.
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 ChatTPT is
a form of very specific strategic writing.
Do I think my experiment with ChatTPT
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.
It'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.
But 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, which
is something that I've continued to carry
through over the last couple of years.
I really judge the technology by the
impact it's had practically for me, And the
fact that I used the career coach, for
example, I remember talking when I got the
invitation from Kate to write what
ultimately became working overtime, my column,
I was talking to ChatGPT about whether it
was the right step for me to take
because I was kind of on the fence.
It would have been freelancing at the
time.
I was kind of on the fence about that
versus looking for a full -time opportunity.
And ChachiPT 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,
and 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.
And 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.
And then you go on to list the number of
things that you committed to delivering in
a two -week period.
This includes eight blog posts, three
ebooks, 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 and 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.
So it was really a lot of foundational
work that once that was set, I could kind of
just iterate through.
And it helped that a lot of the things
were content repurposing, which is one of the
first things that people were really
excited about.
you know, one of the first products that
Every put out was Spiral, which was all
about content repurposing, because that's
something that Every 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
like, I was like, okay, I'll write through all
of the surrounding information that the AI
needs to do a good job.
And then when that like, the 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, at first it feels really effortful
and you're spending a lot of time setting
the scenes, like getting everything lined
up, like in terms of your tools and your
integrations and your context documents.
But 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
over committed myself that that time.
Which I did again like six months later.
I think this might be a common
characteristic of everyone at Emory.
Can 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
fast because I
think I remember some of the context files
that you shared with us and that I saw
around that time.
But I'm curious, what does that look like?
Were they folders that you were sharing?
Were they projects on Claude?
Walk me through what some of those things
look like.
They 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 windows 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 building 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?
What is our competition and what are our
differentiators?
These are units of work that I was used to
doing as a content manager.
I just started with what I was familiar
with.
I started with what I knew and gave that
information to the model.
It did a good job.
At that point I was like, okay, this seems
to be working.
and then 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 because 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 different, like what
is, what is our differentiated thing that
we have to say, and just feeding the AI
all of that foundational stuff
so that it feels true.
So that it kind of has rails to run on.
That's what I'm always, I always think of
is just like creating guardrails and kind
of like a fenced in place for the model to
play,
and then you don't have to 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.
Knowing what you know now and as a writer,
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?
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 contacts like the
data that you're giving it, the frameworks
for
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 you need to have those foundational
elements kind of set up and then like
you'll we'll be wrestling with this
addiction and syntax thing for the rest of
forever.
And when you're referring to the data,
what is the data that you would need to to
put in there?
Well, that's the 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
several months out of date.
And 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 that it's like
the unique insight so that whether that's
like a study that your that your company
has produced or third -party research that
you're pulling in which is something that
I love to do in my writing for working
overtime it's all of the all of the
constitutive elements that go into the the
writing and the model
can then work from that.
But 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.
They're just like, write a style guide, a
guide, a post about style guides based on
what you, the model, already know.
But then what the model already knows as
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 working are
ultimately going to make the writing
unique.
It all sounds like the documents that 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 it's like the quality of the
ingredients right so it sounds like what
you're bringing to the piece it's just the
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.
I love that analogy that's a really good
one that's 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 individual
ingredients to be like fresh and
like good to produce good work.
Yeah.
This is actually something that you
referenced 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 horrible.
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 use to
bump up against time, energy, capacity are
way lower.
And it sounds like that'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 what is uniquely in your brain.
This is something 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.
It'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 capacity just trying to assemble
sentences that I wasn't really paying
attention to what the sentences as a whole
said or like how like or like I was just
like this is done I'm gonna 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 and 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.
And 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?
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every and now back to the episode This 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 thinking about it.
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 out.
And what I found in my personal experience
is that AI is just as powerful as a
supportive technology.
So 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 you know move
through my day -to -day life.
That's actually become even more true now
with agents being able to handle what our
COO, Brandon, calls computer errands.
So 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 take my insurance
and are accepting new patients.
And it went off and found me someone and 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.
And 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 don't have to like
go digging and like be like looking for
the bomb that is hiding in the, in the, in
the millions of like, uh, things that are
just like subscription notices and stuff,
but the things that need human response
has come to me.
And now I have an automation set up
through Codex, and I have it tell me what's in
my inbox that I need to respond to.
And so my inbox anxiety has been
completely resolved.
And I've just seen a lot of other ways
that AI supports me and allows me to work
better, not just in terms of
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 to
some of those things.
You'll love this, Katie.
For the first time in my life, I'm filing
insurance -free because Codex is filing my
insurance reimbursements.
I would rather pay insurance than how 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 talk about
that and you say, I've been working at
Avery for one year now, and 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 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 to me, that's such a clear AI win.
Can you tell us a little bit more about...
So we started out with you going to
ChatTBT over two years ago and
asking it 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
how that has evolved and what that looks
like today?
My writing process?
This is for the kind of career,
like what the equivalent of your career
coach looks like today.
Oh my gosh, my career coach has evolved so
much.
It is now a project inside of my codecs
and it has so much more information than
the first version.
So it has a dossier on me and my role and
it has
context around every and our super top
secret brand
positioning that I got from our head of
marketing, 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's helped, it helps me now, now
that I'm in a job and not looking, not
meeting the career coach to help me find a
job, it helps me orient myself
prioritize.
It does project management for me and now
increasingly all of this is happening just
with voice, like with monologue.
I'd 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 put 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 the due date on this
deliverable?
And it will tell me.
Can you tell us a little bit more about
how that's set up?
That sounds incredible.
So like that's the thing 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
things 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
role positioning is.
It has my OKRs for Q2 and now Q3 because
somehow it became
Q3 which should not be legal and some
other things like that.
So it just has a ton of these,
again it's all context, it's all
documentation that increasingly I don't manually
create.
I how they I 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's 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
said 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 data
from 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 kind of like had envisioned in my
mind.
So 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 TBT, you
know, how can you help me as a career
coach to having a fully autonomous codec
setup that maintains your to -do list,
your OKRs, it keeps you on track with a
Can -bin board and at this point your
codecs is maintaining it for you.
Yes.
Is that insane?
So I mean, this is amazing, right?
I think one of the things that you're
uniquely great at is using AI for kind of like
powering your career harness and also your
ability to write really, 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 the 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 writing plugin?
Yeah, so compounding 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
Klassen'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 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 going to make a better
decision.
And so the Compound Writing plugin, it
started, 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 about it 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 compound 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 conventions, you're looking for
things like structure, voice,
evidence, and like all of these kinds of
different things.
So it's a different, like there's a
different, it's a different container, but like
it just made sense to me.
So like again, I just talked to Claude and
said, you know, I want I want these steps
in the process I want you know, I want an
outline to look like this I want a draft
to be done this way and like these are the
kinds of review and then like I want two
different kinds of Reviews like a
substantive edit That's like the big picture
structure in the argument and then a line
at it that looks at the individual writing
and then a final pass that like looks at
like just the final details that you want
something to be publication ready.
And I was able to pull that together just
like, I always 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 that'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 chadgbt .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, the context files
about this, but like still the, many of
the same context files that used to live
in the project in terms of like 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 comes
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 now if you're on the ever
GitHub.
Dang.
Okay, great.
I will definitely have to try it.
One of the things that I find so exciting
about a great plugin.
A great plugin to me is like an expert
instruction manual for how to do something
you have no business doing.
And so for me, for compound engineering,
I am not an engineer by trade, and yet I
spend my weekend building different
products and products that 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 like a great team of engineers
would use for different steps in the kind
of like product build process.
Obviously it begins with something like a
PRD or a plan.
Things are scoped really well, there's
security element, obviously there's
compounding at the end, but this is a
process that if 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
the 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 little bit
more flavored, like it's more of a
reflection of how you write, or can it be kind of
like a generic tool that other people can
use, even if they're not professional
writers?
I definitely 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 that they can produce something
that they maybe hadn't been able to produce
before.
But,
and like, I think that, and like,
honestly, I think, and I wrote about this in a
piece for working overtime, 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 like 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 know, 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 base it, you can borrow
this framework.
It's not that 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 scale.
And I've done that with several different
writers that I admire.
So another one I have is Hitchcock,
which is based on Hitchcock's principle of
suspense.
So he has this famous quote about a bomb
under the table where like if there's a
bomb under the table and it explodes,
that's a 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 turned that into a skill that
assesses, okay, does this, does this make the
reader lean in?
Does this make the reader like anxious and
curious to see what will happen next?
And that becomes another lens that you can
apply to, to writing.
And so I get a lot of value out of that as
an experienced writer even because like
I'm not always able to like consider all
of those different lenses but now I can
just sort of like 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 admire.
It'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
Zadaris 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 that'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, you know,
10 years ago or even five years ago,
right?
In compelling ways that feel
authentic and and of 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 plug
-in like the Compound Writing plug -in it
just 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 a better writer so much
faster.
So I'm personally so excited to be using
that tool.
Thank you for making the plugin.
It is a gift, especially coming from you.
And I think it really informs this new
chapter that we're in AI, which is, you know,
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.
You know, like 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 as well.
So that's like, yeah, just like I wrote my
like my 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 it distills that into a style
guide.
It's like okay this is like this is what
you admire and appreciate in writing that
you might want to inform your own pieces
and I built an MCP because I was like I
want to be able to like add new clips and
like pull my style guide down without
actually having to go to the app just
while I'm in Codex and like or Claude and like
I built it and I don't think I had the
most up -to -date compound engineering plugin
that had more robust security features and
Claude was just like I'll build that for
you no problem and then like I asked Codex
to review it and Codex was like there are
five security vulnerabilities here so AI
got me in the trouble and then AI got me
out of the trouble, but like just the fact
that I'm here like building these kinds
of products, like I built my website, like
that's crazy.
Like it's crazy that I'm able to do that,
but all I have to do is like 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 you for putting it out there.
Katie, 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 a
codecs, 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
fifth at 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 haven't really spent time in New York or
SF or Austin and all these big tech hubs.
And I believe, 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 that I
have connections.
Like, I have access to really great
thinkers, and like, 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 and
budget to experiment with these tools and
like get a subscription and vibe code
until 2 a .m.
if that's what's interesting to me.
And I think that what I want to challenge
the AI community with is 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 to end this compounding
capacity.
But the risk there is that value is going
to compound to the 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 aspire 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, to
see the public release of the compound
writing plugin.
And thank you for your time.
Thanks for having me.
This was fun.
eye and I why because this show is the
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And now, without any further ado, let me
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