How I use AI

Everything on this site published since August 2026 follows the process described here.

My writing starts with something I am already thinking about. The ideas come from my what I'm working on, what I'm reading, my undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy and theory, my years teaching middle school, and more than a decade of programming. I use a model to talk through those ideas, question them, and help me develop them into essays.

Research. I bring my own sources. An idea usually starts with something I'm reading or working on, and I already know the theorists and books it connects to, since my essays tend to circle the same themes. I use a model to challenge my interpretations of the sources I choose. I read everything I cite.

Outlining. I bring sources, ideas, and my provisional outline to the model. A detailed outline emerges from a back-and-forth discussion with the model, working through the argument and deciding what belongs where. Before drafting, I need to understand why each section is there and how it contributes to the whole.

Drafting. I turn the outline into prose section by section. I put parts of the outline below my prose and delete from the outline as I incorporate the ideas. The outline is a living document that gets updated as i write and new ideas bubble up.

Revising. I have a model flag redundancies and places that could be tightened or consolidated. When a suggestion helps, I use the observation to rewrite the passage myself. I avoid model-generated sentences in the published text.

Throughout this process, I hold myself to one standard: I have to be able to defend every sentence as my own. That means explaining what it claims, why it belongs, and why I chose it over the alternatives.

This process has made writing more enjoyable. I used to get stuck on the bare outline, a paragraph I knew was wrong but couldn't diagnose, or a transition that will not come together. Having something to think out loud against helps me work through those obstacles. With the help of AI, I spend more time finding out what I think and figuring out how to say it.

I remain involved at every stage, and that involvement matters to me. Writing has become something I look forward to and one of the most enjoyable parts of my working life.

In Agentic Alienation, I describe what I miss when I hand work to agents and return to collect the result. Writing with AI has helped me understand what I want to preserve: the experience of working through an idea and arriving at something I understand and mean.