Katie Parrott on using ChatGPT for writing and career reflection

Hey, it's Dan Shipper, and this week I'm excited to share a very special episode of AI and I. In this episode, we're previewing the release of an experimental new plugin called Compound Writing, which helps you write with AI the way that we do internally. It's inspired by Kieran Klassen's Compound Engineering, and it's built by one of our staff writers, Katie Parrott. To help talk about this plugin and why Katie made it and how she uses it, Natalia Quintero is the host of this episode. She's our head of AI consulting and she's been on the podcast a few times and she's just an incredible interviewer. So I'm really excited for you to hear Katie and Natalia chat.

Today we're talking to Katie Parrott, staff writer at Every. Katie, if you've been following Every for a while now, will be very familiar to you. She's one of our all-star writers and we're so excited to learn more about her writing process and her new plugin today. Hi, Katie. How are you? I'm good. How are you? So good. I am so excited for this conversation. I am revealing myself as a Katie fangirl on the podcast. It's a mutual fandom. Thank you. Okay, so Katie, almost exactly two years ago, you wrote one of your most popular pieces for Every, and it was about how you had just been laid off and also maybe were in the middle of a mental health crisis, which you've written publicly about, and you decided to turn to ChatGPT as a career coach,

But at the time, you were also an AI skeptic, which might be crazy to think about now, given some of the work that you're doing. But can you take us back to that period? What was going on in your career and in that moment in time that led you to turn to ChatTBT in the first place? Yeah, so I had just been let go from a crypto firm where I was working as an editor and ghostwriter for the team. And in hindsight, it was traumatizing at the time, but in hindsight, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it led me back to every... Uh, and, but I was feeling really lost as you mentioned, you know, like I had like tried crypto, I had tried, um, you know, in-house, I had tried out of house, I had tried all these different things and I felt like I was at the end of,

of what I could do on my own. And I really needed an outside perspective, but because I was working on a budget with no clear visibility into how long I would be unemployed, hiring a real career coach wasn't really an option for me. So I had some exposure to ChatGPT at that time. I had actually used it to produce briefs at a previous job as a content marketing manager, we had an agency and I realized, and I was like hitting a wall of depression at that job and like could not bring myself to put words on a page. But I found that if I used ChatGPT to generate some of the repetitive stuff and it became this assistive tool that I used as a tool for thought, which was a phrase I'd also seen Dan use.

around the same time because I was following every at the time. And so it was kind of that combination of things where I was like, okay, I can't afford like $150 an hour or however much a career coach would be, but I can sign up for a $20 a month ChatGPT subscription. And, you know, get some of that same result of externalizing my thinking and getting an outside perspective and just holding me accountable for... how I was thinking about my career journey and challenged me when I would get a little like I have a tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst and it kind of took me out of myself in that way too and it was just like a really great experience for me and like kind of and it ultimately led me to every so yeah.

Yeah, it's such a cool post that you wrote. And you have you just always have such great zingers in your writing that are just so delightful to read. I hope when we are sharing this on video, we can pull up some of the screenshots of just what your chat deputies prompts and screenshots look like because It feels vintage to be looking at, you know, chat from two, two and a half years ago. But in that post, you have this really great quote. It's a little lengthy, but I'm going to try to read it because I have a question about it. So you say, one of my favorite things about writing is that I never know what I think until I write it down.

But once I write it down, it becomes obvious. Ultimately, what's prompting chat dbt is... A form of very specific strategic writing. Do I think my experiment with Chad to PT added clarity in my thinking? Yes, it has. But as with so many of these tools, the real work is still mine. Clarity, it turns out, doesn't arrive gift-wrapped from a digital assistant or even a human coach. It's something I had to dig out for myself, question by question and prompt by prompt. True clarity, direction, and answers come from the process of engaging with the prompts and doing the hard work yourself. Yeah, I can help guide the way, but the journey is yours to take. Just so beautiful. Just so, so cool. And, you know, I think one of the things that really resonates with me about your writing is that this feels so reflective of my experience using AI, where I am attracted to the possibility of maybe an easy answer, an easy solve.

But actually what I constantly find myself doing is learning something that was always there inside of me, but I had to put some work in and some clarity into to like actually get it out of me. Can you tell me a little bit more about what using AI in this very early experience and this very kind of practical high value experience, what it taught you about using AI? Yeah. the first thing it taught me is that I can use AI to make change in my life, which is something that I've continued to carry through over the last couple of years. You know, I really judge the technology by the impact it's had practically for me.

And, you know, the fact that I, you know, used the career coach, for example, I remember talking when I like got the invitation from Kate to write what ultimately became working overtime, my column, and, you know, I was talking to Chad GPT about whether it was the right step for me to take because I was kind of on the fence. It would have been freelancing at the time. I was kind of on the fence about, that versus looking for a full-time opportunity. And ChatGPT nudged me in the direction of like, well, why not try it in the meantime? And I did that and now I'm here.

And throughout my experience with AI, that's really been the thing is that It's given me both the framework for thinking and obviously it's become the thing I think about. But it's really just about the fruits of the labor, so to speak, and seeing what AI is able to give back to me. So it sounds like one of the early takeaways that you had in leveraging AI was that you could really get it to be a valuable tool for you. And so that reminds me of another post that you wrote that was really popular with the every audience.

And I believe it's titled AI turned me into a content agency of one. And early in this post, you talk about how at the time you were a freelancer, so this is early 2025, and you realize that you had overcommitted yourself or potentially overcommitted yourself with the number of freelance projects that you had agreed to deliver. And then you go on to list the. the number of things that you had committed to delivering in a two week period. This includes eight blog posts, three eBooks, 24 LinkedIn posts. We're not even halfway through 24 X posts, 16 Instagram posts.

I mean, I, there is just no way I could write this amount of content in a month. How did you learn to do that? How did you learn to use AI to generate this amount of content? and at the caliber that I know you deliver? I think around this time was when I was really discovering, I wouldn't have used this language because it hadn't really become a thing yet, but context engineering. And what I realized was if I gave the model a really good foundation in terms of the brand messaging, product specifics, audience specifics of the companies that I was working for,

I could shape the AI outputs toward the direction that I wanted. So it's really, it was really a lot of foundational work that once that was set, I could kind of just like iterate through and it helps that a lot of the things were like content repurposing, which is one of the first things that people were really excited about. You know, the, one of the first products that every put out was spiral, which was all about content repurposing, because that's something that every was doing a lot. You know, you have a post. You want to turn it into a LinkedIn post, a blog, you know, a Twitter post, a blog post. And so, yeah, it was just like, I realized, I was like, okay, I'll write through all of the surrounding information that the AI needs to do a good job.

And then the more I put in that work up front, the easier the process got farther down the line. And that's something that I've found with my AI experience overall. It's just like, you invest, at first it feels really effortful and you're spending a lot of time setting the seams, like getting everything lined up, like in terms of your tools and your integrations and your context documents. But when you have that environment set up, you can just kind of run and like run fast. And that's what I was able to do when I overcommitted myself that, that time, which I did again, like six months later.

I think this might be a common characteristic of everyone at every... Can we talk a little bit more about what was in those files and in the context and in the setup that you created to let you run fast? Because I... I think I remember some of the context files that you shared with us and that I saw, you know, around that time. But I'm curious, like, what does that look like? Were they folders that you were sharing? Were they projects on Claude? Like, walk me through what some of those things look like. they weren't projects because projects didn't exist yet. And I remember at the time, like at the time projects launched, I thought back to that, that period.

I was like, I really wish that this had existed when I was doing this. Cause I had to do a lot of manual copy and pasting. Like I would have my persistent documents and I would just in a Google doc and I would copy and paste into the context window so that the agent, so that it wasn't an agent. Well, I guess maybe it was an agent. I don't know. but so that the model would have access to that information. And it really came from my experience in the content marketing world building style guides. Every brand worth its salt has a source of truth where they document, okay, who is our audience? What are their pain points? how does our product map to those pain points?

You know, what is our competition and what are our differentiators? Like these are units of sort of work that I was used to doing as a content manager. And so that I just started with what I was familiar with. I started with what I knew and, gave that information to the model and it did a good job. So at that point I was like, okay, this seems to be working. And then, you know, projects came along and I did. So suddenly I didn't have to copy paste anymore because I could use project documents and I could use the custom instructions to sort of set a project up.

And I had a project for every freelance client. I had a project for every column that I worked on because I was starting to spread out in terms of what I was doing at every at that time. But it all comes down to basic rules of writing and knowing who is our audience, You know, what is our differentiated thing that we have to say? And just feeding the AI all of that foundational stuff so that it feels true. So that it kind of has rails to run on. That's what I always think of. It's just like creating guardrails and kind of like a fence in place for the model to play.

And then you don't have to like worry so much about getting something that's completely wrong because you're kind of pushing it in the right direction. Right. You've given it a playground. I know this is something that Mike Taylor on our team cares a lot about, you know, having really clean context windows and being very selective of what playground you're giving model. Knowing what you know now and as a writer, what are, you know, what are the things that you think have made it so that your projects are so successful? Is it having a really strong point of view on what good writing is on what good content marketing is? Like, what are those things that are so important to have a strong perspective on?

I think it's, it's less about the, the writing at first than it is about the, um, the contact, the other kinds of context, like the, the data that you're giving it, the, um, the frameworks for like person audience personas and who should they should be talking to like you need all of that in place before you can even get to stuff like use this use these words and avoid these words like prefer this level of like this level of reading difficulty and like strike this tone like before you even get to the point where you're sort of messing with that kind of stuff you need to

have, um, you need to have those foundational elements kind of set up and then like, you'll, we'll be wrestling with this addiction and syntax thing for the rest of forever. So And when you're referring to the data, what is the data that you would need to put in there? Well, that's the specifics of the piece. So something that I feel really strongly about our role as humans in this wonderful world of AI and AI writing specifically is that there's sort of a last mile problem in writing, in AI and writing, which is AI... has that knowledge cut off, right? It's always working with data that's several months out of date.

And our job as the humans is to close that last mile and provide the real world experiences that AI can't get because they come after the knowledge cut off. It's also out there happening somewhere in the real world and AI is not in the real world, the physical world yet. So when I say research, I'm really talking about the unique or data that it's like the unique insights so that whether that's like a study that your company has produced or research. third-party research that you're pulling in, which is something that I love to do in my writing for working overtime. It's all of the, all of the constitutive elements that go into the, the writing and, um, um,

The model can then work from that. But the inputs are really what makes the writing unique. I think a lot of times when people are writing with AI, they just kind of go to it and say, write a blog post about style guides. Let's just use that as an example. And they don't give it anything to go on. They're just like, write a style guide. guide, a guide, a post about style guides based on what you, the model, already know. But then what the model already knows is commoditized information. Like that's not useful or interesting. So the data is the unique insight, the data point that the model doesn't have access to yet, the personal experience, all of those things that are ultimately going to make the writing unique.

It almost sounds like the documents that you save for what might be a project today, or what might be maybe like a codex sort of setup, is all of the things that can be codified as like good best practices. But then what you bring into every piece, it's like the it's like the quality of the ingredients, right? So it sounds like what you're bringing to the piece is just the sort of like freshness, quality, and unique elements of the piece that you want to highlight and bring out that only you can really bring. I love that analogy. That's a really good one. That's pretty much exactly it. You know, the model is the kitchen, the, you know, the, you know, like structure, like the outline is like chopping and the composition is like boiling, but like you need the individual ingredients to be like fresh and like good to produce good work.

Yeah. This is actually something that you reference very early on in this piece in 2025. You have this really beautiful quote, and I'm sorry to read you your great quotes back to you. It's horrifying. So you write, two odd years into my AI journey, I have to admit, AI hasn't just helped me produce content faster than, It has fundamentally changed the scale of what I can do. The limits of what I used to bump up against time, energy, capacity are way lower. And it sounds like that's the recipe, right? It's like you would always be using the same recipe, but now you don't have to worry so much about the recipe. The recipe is codified. Now you can really just...

come to the table with like what is uniquely in your brain. This is something you also say in the post, it's become trite to say that AI frees you to focus on the human elements that truly matter. But AI has freed me to focus on the human elements that truly matter. I remember that one. It's magic seeing it from the outside, you know, like I have no idea how you do it. And it's magical every time that you put another piece together. It's magical to me too. Like that's really all I can say is like the fact, like working with AI kind of made me fall in love with writing again.

Because for a long time writing to me, it just felt like such a slog. It was like so effortful. I was spending so much like energy and mental capacity just trying to assemble sentences that I wasn't really paying attention to what the sentences as a whole said, or like, I was just like, this is done. I'm gonna get it off my plate. It's good enough. And now with AI, I have like the energy left over to, to spend more time wrestling with those harder, bigger picture questions. And it's just made writing, writing a lot more fun because it's brought back a feeling of exploration and discovery, um, both with the tool, but then also with my own brain and, and what, what I think and like how I bring that to life.

So I want to turn back a moment to, you know, there's two things that I admire so much in the way that you use AIs. Uh, and one is obviously the way in which you use it for writing, but the other is the way in which you use it kind of like as a harness for doing your best work. And you have this, uh, this really beautiful piece that you, uh, you wrote in about a year ago. So kind of like mid 2025 called AI solved the problem that I couldn't explain to managers. Uh, And in this piece, you talk about how, or actually, can you tell us a little bit about this piece?

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Try Adio for free at adio.com slash every. That's adio, A-T-T-I-O dot com slash every. And now, back to the episode. This is the piece where I talk about my mental health and my crippling anxiety around email. Um, yeah, so this is a piece that, um, this is, this is like one of the most personal and like one of my favorite pieces that I wrote because it's about AI viewed through a different lens than I think we're used to thinking about it. You know, we think about AI as a productive technology, right? We value it for its ability to produce output and get things out of our, like, just put stuff out.

And what I found in my personal experience is that AI is just as powerful as a supportive technology. So, you know, I have bipolar disorder. I experience spikes of like high energy. And honestly, frankly, I spend a lot more time in really lows of depression. And what I found is that AI kind of reduces friction in my life in a way that like makes it easier for me to person. It makes it easier for me to work. It makes it easier for me to. to move through my day-to-day life. That's actually become even more true now with agents, being able to handle what our COO, Brandon, calls computer errands.

So I put off making a primary care physician appointment for three years, and then I realized I could simply tell Codex to go find primary care physicians near me, that like how that take my insurance and are accepting new patients and it went off and found me someone and I booked an appointment and that's something that just would I would never have done I would have just kept procrastinating on it infinitely because of the way my brain works and was able to to help me over that hump and it's done that over and over again so like you know using Quora to make my inbox more manageable so I'm not confronting a wall of emails but just the really important ones that need my human response that's completely changed my relationship to my inbox because I don't have to like go digging and like be like looking for the bomb that is hiding in

in the millions of like things that are just like subscription notices and stuff. But like the things that need human responses come to me. And like now I have an automation set up through Codex to like, and I have it tell me what's in my inbox that I need to respond to. And so like, my like inbox anxiety has been completely resolved. And I've just seen a lot of other ways that, that AI supports me and allows me to work better. Not just in terms of like using it for the output, but using it for everything that surrounds the output. Right. It's like, it's not just the medical appointments, it's the bills, it's the emails, it's

the tasks that, you know, you'll never really get around to doing like around the house or whatever it might be. And it does feel to me with AI that I have a little bit more firepower to get to some of those things. You'll love this, Katie. For the first time in my life, I'm filing insurance reimbursements because Codex is filing my insurance reimbursements. I would rather pay insurance than have to manually do that. And it's exciting to have a tool that I feel like can really work in my favor. In this particular piece, you talk about that and you say, I've been working at Avery for one year now.

And that might not sound remarkable, but it feels like a milestone. For me, the proof of AI's value is the fact that I'm still here doing work I'm proud of. And it kind of is the greatest measure of success that you get to do more of the work that you're excited to wake up and do every day. And to me, that's such a clear AI win. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, so we started out with you going to Chat TVT, you know, over two years ago and asking it to be your AI coach. And it's enabled this incredible amount of work that you're doing now. You've talked about it in some posts. Now it looks a little bit more like a Codex project, if I believe.

Can you tell us a little bit more about like how that has evolved and what that looks like today? My writing process? For this is for the kind of like career, like what the equivalent of like your career coach looks like today. Oh my gosh, my career coach has evolved so much. It is now a project inside of my codex. And it has so much more information than the first version. So it has a dossier on me and my role. And it has context around every and our... you know, super top secret brand positioning that I got from our head of marketing, Douglas, that I was like, okay, if we put, and then what I'm able to do with that is like, okay, here's the context on me and my role.

Here's the context on every, how do I put those two things together? What should I prioritize to have the biggest impact that I can? And so it helps me now. Now that I'm in a job and not needing the career coach to help me find a job, it helps me orient myself, prioritize. It does project management for me. And now increasingly all of this is happening just with voice, like with monologue. I monologue like a ton all day, every day. And I'll just like... talk to my career coach about, like, I've got four different priorities. Like, what should I, what should I, what should I do in what order?

And it kind of operates as that chief of staff that kind of, like, points me in a direction and says, this is the highest impact thing you can do first. This is, like, maybe something that you can... put off until later. And then that like, and it just helps do that kind of, that kind of work. And it maintains a Kanban board for me. I've never been a person that can maintain a Kanban board, but now I don't even have to touch it. It just lives in this little career coach management project land. And I just like say like, what's like, what's the due date on this deliverable? And it will tell me. Can you tell us a little bit more how that, how that's set up?

That sounds incredible. So like that's the thing is you kind of forget over time as it starts to work. You just take for granted that it's working and you don't think about what's inside it so much anymore. So let me find career coach mode. Yeah. So it's got evidence is one of the folders. So, you know, I periodically scrape all the data out of our content management system. into a spreadsheet and like I have that. So I know like how my posts are performing. It also has like reader feedback and other things. Like I maintain what I call my validation folder, which is just full of nice things people have said about my work. That becomes another input because that helps the model understand, okay, what do people respond positively to in my work that we want to like reinforce?

It has references. Like that's where my, my role positioning is the, um, um, It has my OKRs for Q2 and now Q3 because somehow it became Q3, which should not be legal. And some other things like that. So it just has it just has a ton of these. Again, it's all context. It's all documentation. that increasingly I don't manually create. I have AI created for me through an interview process. I'm always having AI interview me. Alex Duffy gave me that tip early on in my time at Every, and it just completely changed how I work with AI, because I'll just be like,

ask me questions to draw out what I think about this. And that's how I was able to pull together the career coaches. Like I just said, I wanna create a career coach. This is what I wanted to do. And then I started just showing it a bunch of context documents, like all of the data from the performances and like my validation folder. And we just talked until we got to a place where we had a system that worked the way that I kind of like had envisioned in my mind. So in two years, which is, you know, a lot of time in AI time, but in two years, you went from prompting a simple prompt on chat TPT, you know, how can you help me as a career coach to having a fully autonomous codec setup that maintains your to do list.

your OKRs, it keeps you on track of the Kanban board. And at this point, your codex is maintaining it for you. Is that insane? So, I mean, this is amazing, right? I think one of the things that you are uniquely great at is using AI for, you know, kind of like powering your career harness and also your ability to write really, really great pieces. And so going back to the writing component, you know, we talked a little bit about some of the how you've created AI to basically kind of like hold the recipe for you, like how you think about good writing.

And then the elements that you bring to each writing session so that it can just allow you to do your best work. And. Now, you are, I think by the time that this podcast airs, we will have published your compound writing plugin. Can you tell us a little bit about what compounding is as a concept and then about the writing plugin? Yeah, so compounding is the idea that every piece of feedback that you give to AI should feed back into this system to improve the next output.

So obviously, for folks that follow Every, they'll be familiar with this from Kieran Claussen's compound engineering plugin. He was really the one to pioneer this idea that you should only have to give a piece of feedback once, and if you codify it the right way, it will... be there forever and the next time you're in that same situation, the AI is going to make a better decision. The compound writing plugin, it started like I literally just forked, forked is a word that I know now because I'm, I wouldn't have known if I weren't working with AI, but I pulled the compound engineering plugin down and talked to Claude, and said I want to take this,

this compound engineering plugin and adapt it for writing. Because in certain ways, writing is very similar to code. Like the, like, you know, the, the compound engineering plugin has like brainstorming, ideating, planning, you know, working and then reviewing. And very similarly in, in writing, you have like, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, reviewing, and it's kind of a similar kind of flow, but there are also differences. Like obviously I don't need my, you know, for writing you're not looking at things like coding conventions, you're looking for things like structure, voice,

evidence and like all of these kinds of different things. So it's a different, like there's a different, it's a different container, but like it, it just made sense to me. So like, again, I just talked to Claude and said, you know, I want, I want these steps in the process. I want, you know, I want an outline to look like this. I want a draft to be done this way. And like, these are the kinds of review. And then like, I want two different kinds of reviews, like a substantive edit. That's like, the big picture structure and the argument and then a line at it that looks at the individual writing and then a final pass that like looks at like uh just the final details that you want something to be publication ready. And I was able to pull that together.

Just like I always like all of my best AI ideas I've ripped off from someone else on the every team. So it was very much compound engineering plus Dan's agent native architecture guide that kind of combined together to create compound writing. And now that's what I use. all the time for every piece that I write. I'm no longer in a chat window. I'm no longer in a project on Claude.ai or ChatGPT.com. I am like in the Claude desktop app or the ChatGPT desktop app. working with this system that has all that, again, has the recipe of how I want the drafting process to go.

And then it has the, the context files about this, like still the many of the same context files that used to live in the project in terms of like a style guide, example pieces. Uh, and then, um, again, I just bring the fresh information into that ecosystem and, a piece comes out of it one way or another. Somehow a piece appears. I'm so excited to use it when it becomes available. I hope to be an alpha tester of it when you're ready to share it. Oh, it's on the GitHub. You can get it now if you're on the every GitHub. Dang.

Okay, great. I will definitely have to try it. One of the things that I find so exciting about Oh Great Plugins A great plugin to me is like an expert instruction manual for how to do something you have no business doing. And so for me, for compound engineering, I am not an engineer by trade, and yet I spend my weekend, you know, building different products and products that I rely on now, you know, every day. And what compound engineering allows me to do is to build a product using the logic and as practices that a great engineer and actually like a great team of engineers would use for different projects.

steps in the product build process. Obviously, it begins with something like a PRD or a plan. Things are scoped really well. There's a security element. Obviously, there's compounding at the end. But this is a process that if you are not an engineer or an expert at building products, it's just totally foreign to you, right? So in the same way that when you were describing the things that you would intuitively do, create as context files for your cloud projects, you know, over a year or two ago. Now it's like I can access Katie's brain recipe with this compound writing, you know, plugin where I don't need, I can, I can both use the tool and the tool can help me do better work.

But I think what's most exciting about a great plugin to me is that it can teach you how to do that kind of work, right? So it can teach you how to be a great writer because it presents the steps, the options, and the different directions that you might take at any step. Do you find that for writing in particular, because it's not so deterministic in the way that code is, that it's a little bit more flavored, like it's more of a reflection of how you write, or can it be kind of like a generic tool that other people can use, even if they're not professional writers? I definitely think people can use it who are not professional writers and it may even be better for them because they don't have strong pre-existing opinions about the writing.

And so they're going to be less inclined to nitpick and they'll just be excited that they can produce something that they maybe hadn't been able to produce before. And like, I think that, and like, honestly, I think, and I wrote about this in a piece for, for working over time, like writing with AI is harder than you think. Um, it's made me a better writer. Like the, and the analogy that I use for the compound writing plugin is that it's, it's a, it's a gym. It's a, it's a workout system to like make you a better writer because, um. Most of the so like, for example, in the editing step, I built in a lot of these reviewers. One of my favorites is Vonnegut.

So Kurt Vonnegut had these like eight elements of story structure. So it's things like start as close to the end as possible. you know, every sentence has to earn its place. Give the reader a character they can root for. And I just turned that into a skill in the plugin. And now you can borrow this framework. It's not that like Kurt Vonnegut, the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut is reviewing your work, but he has this framework that I think is really useful for a lot of writers. that you can kind of distill and turn into a skill. And I've done that with several different writers that I admire. So another one I have is Hitchcock, which is based on, it's Hitchcock's principle of suspense.

So he has this famous quote about a bomb under the table, where like if there's a bomb under the table and it explodes, that's one moment of surprise. But if you have people sitting around the table and, And you show the audience the bomb under the table and say, this bomb will go off in five minutes. Now you have five minutes of suspense. And so I turned that into a skill that assesses, okay, does this make the reader lean in? Does this make the reader, like... anxious and curious to see what will happen next. And that becomes another lens that you can apply to writing. And so I get a lot of value out of that as an experienced writer, even because like, I'm not always able to like, consider all of those different lenses.

But now I can just sort of like, invoke Vonnegut, invoke Hitchcock, invoke Sorkin, invoke Sedaris for humor. And, and get those kinds of perspectives on my writing that are informed by these really brilliant storytellers that I admire. It's such a gift. It's so cool that you've done this. I mean, I could totally see how, you know, presented with the opinions of Sorkin and Sedaris and Vonnegut. Someone might say, oh, I really like Vonnegut. Like, that's a framework that really resonates with me. And maybe that is closer to the writing style that I aspire to have and might pursue.

Or equally helpful, you know, sort of like method of writing or sort of like this leaning in. And that's what actually would enable you to develop your own taste, which I think is really what any ambitious AI user wants to do, right? It's like we want to do things that we have no business doing, right? Building products that we have that we wouldn't have been able to build 10 years ago or even five years ago, write in compelling ways that feel authentic and of a caliber that we would be proud of. But it's actually really difficult to do high quality work and it takes a lot of effort.

There's really kind of no shortcut there. Um, but, uh, with a plugin like the compound writing plugin, it just gives you something to react to. It gives you so much more to react to that you can either agree or disagree with, and that can make you a better writer so much faster. So I'm personally so excited to be using that tool. Thank you for making the plugin. It is a gift, especially coming from you. And I think it really informs this new chapter that we're in in AI, which is, you know, we're getting expertise that is codified that allows more people to do more great things, which is just so exciting.

Yeah. I'm benefiting from that on my end. You know, like I also use compound engineering to do things that I have no business doing. Sometimes that gets me in trouble, then AI gets me out of trouble as well. So that's like, yeah, just like I wrote my, like my, one of my most recent pieces for working overtime was about how I accidentally coded a security risk into a product that I had built. I had built an MCP into this app I made called Tastemaker that actually lets you pull clips from different writing you admire and it distills that into a style guide. It's like, okay, this is like, this is what you admire and appreciate in writing that you might want to inform your own pieces.

And I built an MCP cause I was like, I want to be able to like add new clips and like pull my style guide down without actually having to go to the app just while I'm in Codex and like, or Claude and like, I built it and I don't think I had the most up-to-date compound engineering plugin that had more robust security features. And Claude was just like, I'll build that for you. No problem. And then like I asked Codex to review it and Codex was like, there are five security vulnerabilities here. So AI got me in the trouble and then AI got me out of the trouble. But like just the fact that I'm here, like building these kinds of products, like I built my website, like,

That's crazy. Like it's, it's crazy that I'm able to do that, but I, all I have to do is like borrow Kieran's brain and I can do it. Well, I, I borrow Kieran's brain and I'm excited to be borrowing your brain. So thank you. Thank you for putting it out there. Katie, you've been on this journey for really over two years now, you know, all the way from starting to use chat DPT as a career coach. to now having Codex, not just helping you run your work day to day, but now having built your own custom writing plugin. It's such an incredible journey that you've been on.

And in a few months, you'll be speaking at the Every Conference thesis on November 5th at Pioneer Works in front of so many executives and leaders in the AI space. What is your thesis on AI today? My thesis on AI today is that education and access are going to matter more than they ever have before. So something I feel very strongly about is the distribution of opportunity. You know, I am based in Columbus, Ohio. I grew up in the Midwest. You know, I haven't really spent time in New York or SF or Austin and all these big tech hubs.

And I believe, but I believe really strongly that this technology, you know, should be in the hands of as many people as possible. But in order for that to happen, you know, you have to create the right conditions. So, like, I'm very fortunate in... in the fact that I have connections, like I have access to really great thinkers. And like, I can learn from Kieran, I can learn from Dan, I can learn from you. But all of that has been facilitated by the fact that I have a certain amount of economic comfort, I have a certain amount of free time to and budget to experiment with these tools. And like, get a subscription and vibe code until 2am if that's what's interesting to me.

And I think that what I want to challenge the AI community with is thinking about how we can expand those kinds of opportunities to more people and more kinds of people in more different places because AI does have this huge multiplicative capacity and this compounding capacity. The risk there is that that value is going to compound to this small subset of people that happen to be early. And I just think that a much more compelling vision for an AI future is one where everyone is able to come along for the ride. I aspire to that version of the future. Thank you so much, Katie. It's been such a treat to connect today.

So excited to have the public release, to see the public release of the compound writing plugin. And thank you for your time. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more.

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