How I Write With AI (Without Creating Slop)

The best performing post on this blog is a 20,000 word tome on the Google Agent Development Kit. Granted, maybe half the words are code samples, but without AI this would have taken me weeks to write. With AI, it was just a few days.

Great articles, the kind that get shared in Slack channels, bookmarked for later, or ranked on Google or ChatGPT, don’t just happen. They require deep research, careful structure, compelling arguments, and that yo no sé qué quality we call a tone or voice.

They need to solve real problems, offer genuine insights, and reflect the author’s hard-earned expertise.

The traditional writing process goes something like this: ideation (where you wrestle with “what should I even write about?”), research (down the rabbit hole of sources and statistics), outlining (organizing your scattered thoughts into something coherent), drafting (the actual writing), editing (realizing half of it makes no sense), revising (again), and finally polishing (until you hate every word you’ve written).

That’s a lot of work. For a 2,000-word post like the one you’re reading, probably a couple of days of work. And then AI came along and everyone thought they could short-circuit this process with “vibe marketing”, and now we have slop everywhere and no one wins.

Stop serving slop

The problem is that most people have fallen into one of two camps when it comes to AI writing:

Camp 1: The AI Content Mills

These are the people who’ve decided that if AI can write, then obviously the solution is to generate unlimited blog posts and articles with minimal human input. More content equals more traffic equals more success, right?

They’re pumping out dozens of articles per week, each one a generic regurgitation of the same information you can find anywhere else, just rearranged by an algorithm.

Who’s going to read this? They are bots creating content for other bots. Any real human traffic that hits their site will take one look at it and then bounce.

Camp 2: The One-Prompt Writers

On the flip side, you’ve got well-meaning writers who heard AI could help with content creation, so they fired up ChatGPT and typed something like “write me a 2000-word article on productivity.”

Twenty seconds later, they got back a wall of text that reads like it was written by an intern who’d never experienced productivity problems themselves, which, in a way, it was.

Frustrated by the generic drivel, they declared AI “not ready for serious writing” and went back to their caves, doing everything the old way. They still create good content, but it takes long and requires too many resources.

Both camps are missing the point entirely. The problem isn’t AI itself. It’s over-reliance on automation without essential quality control measures in place. They’re both treating AI like a magic one-click content machine.

The Missing Ingredient: Your Actual Brain

Here’s a novel concept. What if humans want to read content that is new and interesting?

Think about what you bring to the writing table that no AI can replicate… creativity, emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, and unique perspectives. Your years of experience in your field. Your understanding of your audience’s real pain points. Your ability to connect seemingly unrelated concepts. Your voice, your humor, your way of explaining complex ideas.

AI, meanwhile, excels at the stuff that usually makes you want to procrastinate, like processing vast amounts of information quickly, organizing scattered thoughts into logical structures, and generating that dreaded first draft that’s always the hardest part.

Two entities with complementary skill sets. You and the AI. Like Luke and R2-D2.

You’re the director, the editor, the strategic thinker, and the voice curator. AI is the research assistant and first-draft collaborator.

You are what makes the content new and interesting. AI helps you shape it.

My AI Writing Process

Let me walk you through exactly how I’ve been using this collaboration to go from scattered thoughts to published article in 1-2 hours instead of a full day, while actually improving quality.

Step 1: I Pick the Topic

This is where your expertise and market understanding are irreplaceable. I don’t ask AI “what should I write about?” That’s a recipe for generic content that already exists everywhere else.

Instead, I pick topics that genuinely interest me or that I think are timely and underexplored. For example, my piece on ChatGPT’s glazing problem, or my deep dive into Model Context Protocol.

The blog post you’re reading right now came from a tweet (xeet?) I responded to.

I start by doing what I call the “thesis dump.” I open a new chat in my dedicated Claude project for blog content and just brain-dump everything I think about the topic. Stream-of-consciousness thoughts, half-formed arguments, random observations, and whatever connections I’m seeing that others might not.

Pro-tip: Create a Claude project specifically for blog content (or whatever type of content you write), upload samples of past work or work you want to emulate, and give it specific instructions on your writing style and tone.

Pro-pro-tip: Use the voice mode on Claude’s mobile app or Wispr Flow on your computer to talk instead of type. And just ramble on, don’t self-edit.

This dump becomes the foundation of everything that follows. It’s my unique perspective, my angle, my voice. The stuff that makes the eventual article mine rather than just another generic take on the topic.

Step 2: AI Does the Research Legwork

Now comes the part where AI really shines. AI excels at supporting literature review and synthesis, processing vast amounts of information that would take me hours to gather manually.

I ask AI to research the topic thoroughly. Before Claude had web search, I’d use ChatGPT for this step. The key questions I want answered are:

• What’s already been written on this topic?
• What angles have been covered extensively?
• What gaps exist in the current conversation?
• What data, statistics, or examples support (or challenge) my thesis?

This research phase is crucial because understanding the landscape helps you write something better than what already exists. I’m not looking to regurgitate what everyone else has said. I want to know what they’ve said so I can say something different, better, or more useful.

The AI comes back with a comprehensive overview that would have taken me hours to compile. Sometimes it surfaces angles I hadn’t considered. Sometimes it finds data that strengthens my argument. Sometimes it reveals that my hot take has already been thoroughly explored, saving me from publishing something redundant.

My WordPress is littered with drafts of posts I thought I were genius insights only to find out smarter people than I have covered everything on the topic.

Step 3: Collaborative Outlining

This is where the collaboration really starts to sing. I ask Claude to create an outline that brings my original thesis dump and the research it has gathered together.

Here it becomes a cycle of drafting, editing, and reworking where I’m actively shaping the structure based on my strategic vision.

“Move that section earlier.” “Combine these two points.” “This needs a stronger opener.” “Add a section addressing the obvious counterargument.” And so on.

By the time I’m done with this back-and-forth, usually about 30 minutes, I’ve got something that looks like a mini-article. It’s got a clear structure, logical flow, and it’s heavily influenced by both my original thinking and the research insights. Most importantly, it already feels like something I would write.

Step 4: Section-by-Section Development

Now comes the actual writing, but in a much more manageable way. Instead of staring at a blank page wondering how to start, I work with AI to flesh out each section one by one.

My guiding principle is to maximize information per word. Every section needs to drive home one key concept or argument, and it needs to do it efficiently. No padding, no fluff, no generic statements that could apply to any article on any topic.

I’ll say something like, “For the section on why most AI content fails, I want to emphasize that it’s not the technology’s fault, it’s how people are using it. Include specific examples of both failure modes, and make sure we’re being concrete rather than abstract.”

Just like with outline creation, I’m working with AI closely to refine each individual section. “Make this more conversational.” “Add a specific example here.” “This paragraph is getting too long, break it up.”

I’ll also directly make edits myself. I add sentences or rewrite something completely. No sentence is untouched by me. AI handles the initial generation and helps maintain consistency, but I ensure the voice, examples, and strategic emphasis stay authentically mine.

Step 5: The Critical Review

Here’s a step most people skip, and it’s what separates good AI-human collaboration from slop.

I ask AI to be my harshest critic.

“Poke holes in this argument.” “Where am I not making sense?” “What obvious questions am I not answering?” “Where could someone legitimately disagree with me?” “What gaps do you see in the logic?”

This critical review often surfaces weaknesses I missed because I was too close to the content. Maybe I’m assuming knowledge my readers don’t have. Maybe I’m making a logical leap without explaining it. Maybe I’m not addressing an obvious counterargument.

I don’t blindly accept the AI’s critique though. Sometimes it gets it wrong, or I just don’t agree with it. But sometimes it gets it right and I fix the issues it identifies.

Step 6: The Sid Touch

Now comes the final step, no AI involved here. I go through the entire article, put myself in the reader’s shoes, and make sure it flows well. I make edits or change things if needed.

I’ll also add a bit of my personality to it. This might be a joke that lightens a heavy section, a personal anecdote that illustrates a point, or just tweaking the language to sound more like how I actually talk.

I call this the “Sid touch” but you can call it something else. Sid touch has a nice ring to it.

“Hey did you finish that article on productivity?”

“Almost! Just giving it a Sid touch.”

See what I did there?

Proof This Actually Works

What used to take me the better part of a day now takes an hour or two tops if I’m being a perfectionist. But more importantly, the quality hasn’t suffered.

I actually think it has improved because the research and outline process is more thorough. The structure is more logical because we’re iterating on it deliberately. The arguments are stronger because I’m actively testing them during the writing process.

I started writing this blog in February this year and I’m already on track to go past 5,000 monthly visitors this month, with hundreds of subscribers. Not because I’m publishing a ton of content (I’m not), but because I’m combining AI’s data processing capabilities with my creativity and strategic thinking to create genuinely useful content.

The Future of Content Writing

If you’re thinking this sounds like too much work and you’d rather create a fully automated AI slop factory, I can promise you that while you may see some results in the short-term, you will get destroyed in the long term.

Platforms will get better at filtering AI slop, just like they learned to handle email spam. It’s already starting to get buried in search results and ignored by readers.

That means the writers who figure out effective human-AI collaboration now will have a massive competitive advantage. While others are either avoiding AI entirely or drowning their audiences in generic content, you’ll be creating genuinely valuable content faster than ever before.

So here’s my challenge to you: audit your current writing process. Are you spending hours on research that AI could handle in minutes? Are you staring at blank pages when you could be starting with a solid structure? Are you avoiding AI because you tried it once and got generic results?

Or maybe you’re on the other extreme, using AI to replace your thinking instead of amplify it?

If so, try the process I’ve outlined. Pick a topic you genuinely care about, dump your thoughts, let AI help with research and structure, then work together section by section while keeping your voice and expertise front and center.

Let me know how it goes!