Mike Taylor is the head of evals at Every and a co-author of "Prompt Engineering for Generative AI" (O’Reilly).
A look inside Mike Taylor’s writing workflow—and the work he still does himself
Last week, head of evals Mike Taylor：https://every.to/@mike_2114 told us about his 13 beliefs about writing with AI：https://every.to/also-true-for-humans/ai-writing-beliefs—from putting more into the prompt than you ask the model to produce to living a life worth writing about. His process starts with gathering that raw material: seeking out experiences, debating ideas, and noticing which topics make people’s eyes light up. Today, he shows you how he turns those beliefs into finished pieces, with a process you can adapt to make your own work worth a reader’s time.
For a closer look at how the writers at Every put AI to work, join Mike, staff writer Katie Parrott：https://every.to/@katie.parrott12 , and senior editor Jack Cheng：https://every.to/@jackcheng for our Write-along tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET, livestreamed on X and YouTube. —Kate Lee：https://every.to/@kate_1767
I t took me a lot of experimenting to find a way of writing with AI that I was happy with. Here’s the process I’ve landed on, from picking a title to arguing with my editor and coaching Claude to write like me. I’m sharing it because it gets the most out of AI, without losing my voice. With this process I’ve cut my writing time for a 1,200-word piece from a day to less than two hours, with no drop in traffic or positive reader comments. Your process will vary with your level of AI adoption. Steal whatever looks useful.
This process works for me, and I’ve refined it with every piece I’ve published since I started writing with GPT-3 in 2020. AI reduces drafting time, but I still do plenty of work on either side: finding an idea, gathering material, figuring out what I mean, and deciding whether the draft delivers it. That’s how my beliefs about AI writing show up in practice. I still have to bring something worth saying and care enough to get it right. If you get stuck in your writing or can’t decide where to use AI, I hope this helps.
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