Developing content with AI
Making things with AI is fast. Suspiciously fast. The old way was to write as you went and tidy it on the fly, and that has quietly flipped. When the making takes minutes, the making stops being the work.
So where did the work go? Into checking. Read that back, because it is the whole point of this page. The bit that used to be most of the effort, the writing, is now the quick part. The bit people skip, reading it properly and deciding whether it is any good, is now nearly all of it.
The making is the easy bit now
It used to be that producing something good took most of your time. You wrote, you reread, you reshaped, all in one slow motion. AI pulls that apart. It hands you a full draft in seconds, polished enough to publish on the spot. So the effort moves. The quality now lives almost entirely in the review: reading it carefully, catching what is wrong, and judging whether it is actually good or just confident. In my experience that review is 90 to 95 per cent of the work. The generating is the quick bit at the start.
If that sounds like more work rather than less, it is not. It is the same work, moved to a different place. You are no longer the one typing every word. You are the one deciding which words stay.
AI-slop is a real thing
When I worked at an AI-first company, we ran into a problem that shows up in every AI-first environment. It has a name now: AI-slop. You can produce an enormous volume of content in almost no time and publish it the moment it lands. That sounds like the dream. It is also exactly the trap, and two things are worth holding onto before you hit publish.
Unchecked work costs you credibility
AI is confidently wrong often enough that publishing without reading it will, sooner or later, put your name on something that is plain wrong. And checking properly is not a quick glance. It takes real time, and that time is the job now, not an optional extra you do if you get round to it.
It changes how you work, and that grates
A constant stream of AI drafts to review is genuinely tiring, and reviewing eats hours you did not used to spend. The answer is not to review less. It is to make the AI hand you something closer to right in the first place, so there is less to fix.
Make it write like you
The single biggest thing that cuts the review burden is giving the AI some memory. Inside a project you can keep documents that tell it how you write: your voice, your preferences, the things you always want and the things you never do. Then it stops handing you generic text you have to rewrite from scratch, and starts giving you something that already sounds like you. The going deeper page covers where these memory files live and how to set them up.
You can go further and train it over time. Write down what you have actually done, the real version rather than the tidy one, and feed that back in. The AI then mirrors a realistic picture of how you work, instead of an idealised one it guessed at. The more honest the record, the more useful the drafts.
Write the longer prompt
The other half of getting good drafts is being directive. A one-line prompt gets you a generic answer that you will spend longer fixing than if you had written the thing yourself. Spend two or three minutes writing two or three paragraphs of instruction and the output jumps. It feels like more effort up front. It is far less effort overall.
Compare these two.
The thin prompt
"Write me an article, no more than 500 words." You get something bland and roughly the right shape, and then a long stretch of rewriting to make it yours.
The directive prompt
"Write me an article for this thing I'm working on. Here is the tone I want, here is who it is for, here is the one thing they should take away, and here is what to avoid." You get something close to usable, because you handed over what was in your head.
The rule underneath it is simple. The context lives in your head, and the AI cannot read your mind. Every minute you spend putting that context into the prompt saves you several on the other end.
Read everything before it goes out, every time. Treat each draft as a confident first attempt from a clever assistant, not a finished piece. The volume AI gives you is only an asset if your standards hold the line behind it.
The short version
- 1The making moved from most of the work to the least of it. Checking is now 90 to 95 per cent.
- 2AI-slop is real: it is easy, and tempting, to publish a pile of it fast. Don't.
- 3Never publish what you have not read. Your credibility is the thing on the line.
- 4Give the AI memory so it writes like you, and train it by recording what you actually do.
- 5Write the longer, more directive prompt. A few paragraphs in, far better out.
None of this is an argument against using AI. It is the best drafting partner I have ever had, and I would not go back. It just means the job changed shape. You are less the writer now and more the editor, the one holding the standard. That part does not move. It is still yours.