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. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! To hear more from Natalia Quintero: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow her on X: @NataliaZarina Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year. Timestamps: 0:00 Start 0:49 Introduction 1:21 How Katie went from being laid off to using ChatGPT as a career coach 8:06 Turning AI into a “content agency of one” 10:59 Building the context files and style guides that make AI outputs useful 14:15 What makes a Claude project actually work 21:18 How AI helped with a mental health crisis and “computer errands” 27:03 Katie’s career coach, now a fully autonomous Codex project 32:27 What compounding means, and building the Compound Writing plugin 38:00 Borrowing Vonnegut, Hitchcock, and Sorkin as AI editing skills 44:49 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