How I use AI to help me write

Tom Bedor, a blogger, describes his evolving use of AI in his writing process, emphasizing a strict separation between AI-generated content and his own writing to preserve his reasoning and style. He uses AI for research briefs and fact-checking but has stopped using it for titles, general feedback, and phrasing cleanup, viewing these as core thinking tasks. Bedor's approach highlights the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI-assisted writing.

How I use AI to help me write AI is a helpful writing tool for me. Without it, I probably wouldn't have gone through the trouble of setting up a blog. However, there's a very thin line between delegating tasks that support writing to AI and letting AI think and write for me. Over time, the scope of tasks I give it has narrowed, and the boundaries have gotten stricter. What I do Firewall AI and human content I strictly separate content I write 1 from what AI writes. Most agents default to writing content for me, so I have strict instructions in AGENTS.md to not do that: I don't have principled moral objections to having AI write content for me. But writing content myself is the best way I have to reason through the topic which makes the exercise valuable to me, regardless of whether anyone reads it . I also don't think AI writing is very good. Its editorial stance is generic 2, watered down and overly cautious. For example: Create agent-generated research briefs When my arguments rely on factual claims, I have the agent prepare a dedicated research brief to answer specific questions. Agents sometimes insist on pulling in copy from my writing and proposing edits. To counter, I also specify a narrow template: AI fact check When I'm done with a post, I ask an AI to run a fact check. Here, AI's editorial cautiousness is useful: I can draft a post with my best impression of the facts, knowing I can clean up misstatements later. For example, in my post on open source models /arguments-against-open-source-ai-are-very-bad/ , I originally had some inaccuracies about encryption litigation. The agent proposed a useful edit: Chasing down subtle factual mistakes like these is cumbersome and time-consuming. Having AI as a backstop lets me expand the scope of what I can confidently write about. What I used to do, but don't anymore Use AI to come up with titles As an experiment, I built a small tool https://github.com/tombedor/hn headlines that generated embeddings for Hacker News posts and compared proposed titles with titles that did well there. I've stopped doing this, because I've come to view post titles as a core element of writing 3, not a quick label slapped on a post. The posts I've struggled to title are also the ones without a clear thesis. If I can't think of a good title, it's a signal that I don't have a well-scoped topic to write about. Ask for general feedback I don't get much mileage out of general "is this good?"-style prompts. When I prompt agents this way, they tend to give me critiques sandwiched between compliments. This can be helpful, but it doesn't help me decide whether a post is worth publishing to my taste. I do still ask AI for counterpoints against my posts, but I keep the questions very specific. Clean up phrasing or structure “Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well It's very tempting to write a draft, ask an agent to clean up awkward phrasing, and hit publish. But AI sentence cleanup is a poor substitute for rereading a draft and doing the editing myself 4. A poorly phrased sentence isn't just a mechanical mistake; it's a smell that some portion of an argument needs more thought. Agent phrasing suggestions are also a backdoor for injecting bland AI-isms into my writing. I used to ask AI to evaluate post structure. But, as with titles, coming up with a writing structure is an integral part of the process, not a mechanical task I can delegate. If I'm struggling to structure a post, the argument I'm making may not be ready to be written yet. Doing the thinking myself AI presents tempting shortcuts that require diligence to avoid. The boundary I strive for is to keep for myself the tasks that create opportunities to think through the writing. What's left to AI is mechanical presentation work and fact-based research. All that said, it's still a helpful tool, and I'm glad I get to use it.