Technical writing has been part of my job description for the past 3 years. And ever since ChatGPT launched, I’ve been experimenting with different workflows and debating about how much to even use AI in my writing process.
This week I overheard someone say „If your first draft isn’t written with AI, you’re doing it wrong“. Sorry, but I strongly disagree. And when I learned this week that Thariq from the Claude Code team who has been writing great technical pieces shared that his “first draft is barely ever written with AI“, I felt reassured to share my own process.
If you expected this to be about my secret prompt template and which skills I run to de-slopify a piece of writing, I’m sorry to disappoint you.
My writing usually starts in Notion, a Google doc, or plain markdown (depending on my mood). Unless it’s a tutorial where the structure I want to follow is clear, it starts out as a huge bullet point list of notes. Straight from brain to doc.
As I research more or have more thoughts on the topic I add more bullets and start clustering them and organizing them under separate ideas. During the outlining process I move the pieces around and merge similar ideas into one. Usually I like to be in Notion for this step because you can just grab and drag and drop single bullet points or whole sections. Once I’m done with that, it looks like this:
- Intro
- Bullet point 1 ...
- Bullet point 2 ...
- Outline sentence 1 ...
- Bullet point 1 ...
- Bullet point 2 ...
- Outline sentence 2 ...
- Bullet point 1 ...
- Bullet point 2 ...
- ...Then I give Claude (my current favorite for this task) the Jordan Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide and my outline and ask it for its feedback on the outline. This is to refine my core thesis. Is this interesting? Does that narrative flow make sense? In the past, I’ve thrown out the original outline and rewritten the whole thing based on Claude’s feedback.
Once I am happy with the rough structure, I start writing the fist draft. For this I copy the bullet points into a Google doc under a tab „Outline“ and the I duplicate it under a tab „Draft 1“ (depending on the complexity I may write up to 8 or 9 drafts).
Then I start the actual drafting process. During this process the bullet points get converted into actual sentences and paragraphs. I don’t write sequentially. During this process I do many passes over the document: Which ever sentence feels the easiest, gets written first. Manually.
I also create a tab called „Garbage collection“. This is where all bullet points or even whole sections go, when I know they need to be removed but it would make the decision harder for me if I just deleted it. This way, I can just go back when I realize I still need it. Also I like to do a pass over the “Garbage collection” tab at the end to see if I can repurpose any ideas as standalone tweets (If they can’t, they probably weren’t good thoughts to begin with).
The drafting process can be a lot of work. It is only when I reach a point where I start to struggle to find the right words, that I start using Claude to convert single bullets into sentences. And later I might even ask Claude to „convert these bullet points into a coherent paragraph. Ignore the order of the bullet points. Feel free to reorder them to make sure they logically flow well“.
As you can see, my drafting process might be shockingly manual for some. But I believe that the core ideas, structure, and narrative flow overall need to come from the human. During my editing process, I use AI more to help me refine sentences, grammar, and reading flow, which I can share in a different blog.
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