Tools like Claude, Codex/ChatGPT and Gemini are great. I use them all day (both at work and personally) for coding, research, digging through data, collecting information etc. But what I don’t use them for is writing, and I strongly suggest you do the same.
Don’t skip the thinking!
Writing forces you to deeply think about the problem you’re solving, and what you’re trying to communicate to your readers. This is why writing is hard, but also why writing is such a useful tool to help you think. If you generate a document based on some bullet points, or whatever the source is, you’re skipping the thinking step. The result probably looks “pretty good”, and you’re likely going to accept it with some minor tweaks. But did you think deeply about the problem? Does the document really reflect the most important things you wanted to communicate? Probably not. But you’ll never know, because you skipped the thinking step.
The issue is not that AI tools are bad at writing (to the contrary), they’re just bad at thinking and coming up with new ideas. And that’s exactly where you come in!
If you’re worried that this will slow you down, ask yourself what your added value is if you’re just prompting an AI to do the thinking for you. Productivity in writing isn’t about producing the most content in the shortest amount of time, just like programming is not about producing the most lines of code. It’s about the ideas you bring, and the impact those ideas have on your team, company or others around you. Does it help your company more to have a 60-page strategy document full of fluff that never gets to the core of what problem you’re solving, or would a 3-page, very well thought through strategy be better?
So no AI to help with documents at all!?
It’s not about being dogmatic. Prevent replacing your own thinking with an AI’s “thinking”, but use tools where they actually bring value.
Once my initial writing (and thinking) is done, I actually do use AI to further improve a document. I’ll use prompts like “Read this doc, what questions would you have?”, or “what is the most important take away in this doc?”. This is similar to asking someone to proofread before you publish. Try to refrain from asking an agent to make fixes or improvements; just ask it questions. Based on the feedback you get back, you’re back in thinking mode how to best address the feedback. Just like you would ask a co-worker for feedback on something you wrote, but you wouldn’t ask a co-worker to “write a document based on these 5 bullet points”.
AI tools are also very useful while preparing to write. Sifting through data, structuring data, finding patterns, etc., are all things that can be done faster, and better, with the use of AI. It can help you better understand a problem, before thinking about solutions for that problem.