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Never automate writing as thinking
Reporting versus thinking
Writing as reporting covers status summaries and launch plans. Models can take as much of it as possible, along with summarizing and translating content from one format to another.
Writing as thinking is the brief that argues for a product, a strategy, or a spicy take. Outlining it, turning it into prose, cutting it, and editing it again is what puts the ideas in line, so the step can't be handed off without handing off the thinking. Blanket rules in either direction, never using models for writing or always using them, are both wrong.
Starting and ending by hand
The method is to start and end the piece by hand. A model can come in during the middle to research a point, pull in data, or push back on an idea. It doesn't write the first version and doesn't polish the prose, and keeping those two ends human keeps thinking from atrophying.
The time rule
A matching rule governs other people's time. A writer who makes someone read a document has first spent at least as long on it as the readers will, and a meeting gets the same treatment: the organizer prepares for the combined minutes everyone will spend in the room.
Why does writing sharpen thinking?
Computer scientist Leslie Lamport, a Turing Award winner, put it this way: if you are thinking without writing, you only think you are thinking. Sentences force an order, so gaps in an argument that felt fine in the head show up on the page. Essayist Paul Graham made a similar case in his 2012 essay Putting Ideas into Words, arguing that writing is often where he finds out what he thinks. Lamport received the Turing Award in 2013.
Why did Amazon replace slide decks with memos?
In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations from Amazon's senior team meetings and asked for narrative memos of up to six pages instead. Each meeting begins with attendees reading the memo in silence. Bezos wrote that full sentences with verbs and nouns force a more complete thought than bullet points can. He described the practice in his 2017 letter to shareholders.
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