When I Let AI Write

I’ve been trying to figure out when it makes sense to let AI write something and when I need to write it myself.

For a while, I encouraged people to ease off the tools. I’d watched someone share a document and then struggle to answer a basic question about it. That bothered me. But telling them to use AI less didn’t really explain my concern. I wanted them to understand what they were putting in front of other people.

I use AI to write often, too. When I’m building a proof of concept, I ask Claude to keep notes as we go. It records the direction I give, the decisions I make, and how the idea changes. That’s useful. I can stay with the work and still have a record to come back to or share.

I review the notes before sharing them, and I’m honest about how they were written.

How this page was written. Claude wrote it as we built, to keep a record of the thinking as the work happened. The words are the tool’s. The direction and the decisions are mine.

Recently, I shared a concept and its notes with a leader I trust. He liked the work. He also said that before we took it to an executive leader, the notes needed to be rewritten for that person. I agreed.

Those notes had been right for our conversation. He could explore the concept, question a decision, help me see what I’d missed. They weren’t right for someone who only needed to understand the proposal and decide.

That helped me put words to the question I’d been working through: am I asking someone to think with me, or am I asking them to make a decision?

If I’m inviting someone into work that’s still taking shape, Claude’s notes can help. They give us something to look at and question together.

When I’m asking someone to make a decision, I need to work through what matters to that reader. What do they need to understand? What’s still uncertain? What am I asking them to do? The record of how I got there may contain all of that, but I shouldn’t leave them to pull it together.

AI can still help me draft. I need to make the choices about what belongs in the document and how to explain it. Sometimes working through those words is also how I realize I haven’t quite figured out the ask.

I don’t have a perfect rule yet. But thinking about what I’m asking of the reader gives me a more useful place to start than checking whether the writing sounds like AI.