Writing is thinking. Leslie Lamport put it more sharply in a 2014 talk: if you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. He also quoted the cartoonist Dick Guindon: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”

Lately I’ve been breaking that rule in a new way. I’m not skipping the writing. I’m handing it to AI.

A draft is a test Link to heading

An idea in my head feels complete. It has no gaps because I never have to look at all of it at once. Writing forces order: this claim before that one, this because of that. The gaps show up as sentences I can’t finish and transitions I can’t justify.

That friction is the point. When I can’t write the next sentence, I don’t understand the thing yet. Revising is going back until I can.

Fluent prose hides the gaps Link to heading

AI removes the friction. Give it a rough idea and it returns clean paragraphs with transitions that sound right. The gaps are still there, papered over with fluent text.

Then I’m editing instead of thinking. Editing a draft someone else wrote is a different task: I judge whether it reads well, not whether I believe it. The urge to accept a suggestion instead of reworking the argument is strong, and I’ve given in to it more than I’d like. It has made me complacent.

The output is often good. That’s the problem. A bad draft forces a rewrite. A good one lets me skip the part where I figure out what I think.

The rule Link to heading

So I’m changing the order:

  1. Write the first draft myself. Rough is fine. An unfinished sentence tells me where I’m confused.
  2. Revise it myself, more than once, until I can state the main point in one sentence and defend every section.
  3. Then hand it to AI for refinement: tightening, clarity, factual errors, places a reader will get lost.

Most of the time goes to steps one and two. By step three the AI is working on something I already understand, so I can evaluate its suggestions. I know what I meant.

One test for step three: if I accept a change, can I explain why it’s better? If not, I don’t take it.

This won’t be easy Link to heading

The pressure runs the other way. AI tools are fast, they’re part of how my work gets done, and the incentives reward using them. Writing the first draft myself looks slow.

It is slower. But the draft was never the product. The thinking was, and a draft I didn’t struggle with is one I didn’t think through.