Writing as Thinking

Writing as the struggle through which beliefs, judgment and self are formed — outsourcing it to AI outsources the thinking, risking convergence of style and thought.

Also known as: Writing, writing is thinking, Cognitive struggle, cognitive struggle, Linguistic convergence (at civilizational scale), linguistic convergence, Co-creator, Self

How authors use it

Oldest first (extraction date when no publication date is known).

Documents (12)

• Writing vs. Thinking Masoud Bahrami · 2026-09-21 Reader 🖥️
  Writing is not merely a record of a thought fully formed beforehand but one of the mechanisms by which thinking itself happens — a claim the author grounds in how articulation forces precision, how revision continues (rather than merely polishes) an argument, and how the same dynamic explains why naming and language do real design work in software, not just communication work.
• Why I'm Writing Rachel's Ramblings Rachel Laycock (Thoughtworks CTO; martinfowler.com — Rachel's Ramblings) · 2026-07-28 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Rachel Laycock has real, not-yet-articulated patterns and hypotheses about how software, teams, and organizations are changing in the AI era, and she is committing to publish them fast and imperfectly — rather than polished and delayed — because writing is the forcing function that turns her associative, conversation-honed thinking into something durable outside her head.
• Fragments: July 21 Martin Fowler · 2026-07-21 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  This is not a single-thesis essay but a set of retreat dispatches with no forced unifying claim; the headline findings from the underlying Thoughtworks report are quoted up front but only two of the five (the executive/engineer expectation gap, and — more thinly — verification-as-bottleneck) are actually elaborated in the body, while the recurring thread that does run through the fragments that follow is a practitioner's-eye skepticism about the gap between AI hype and what people who actually work with LLMs observe — in board expectations, incident response, vibe-coding governance, and even the felt experience of reading AI-touched prose.
• Det skal være vanskelig Erik Børve Rasmussen · 2026-07-10 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Difficulty is the mechanism of learning, not a defect in it, so AI — a machine for removing difficulty — destroys learning wherever the process rather than the product was the whole point (school, unlike work); the remedy is therefore to redesign AI and assessment as skill-forcing 'simulators' rather than to ban them.
• The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams Jay Acunzo · 2026-06-18 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  AI slop, infinite online advice and content noise are all the same thing — secondhand information, knowing *about* — whereas the durable, non-commoditizable value of any creator's work comes only from firsthand lived experience synthesized through a distinctive personal perspective, so the response to the AI era is to draw on your own life rather than let the noise convince you your experience doesn't matter.
• Brain Food: Answers Without Effort Shane Parrish (FS) · 2026-06-14 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Understanding — and the confidence, success and clutch performance that stand alongside it — cannot be borrowed or shortcut; all are earned only through whole-hearted, sustained effort, so an answer you obtain without effort is hollow because it never becomes understanding you actually own.
• Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence Ethan Mollick · 2026-06-04 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  The tight, human-centered, back-and-forth 'co-intelligence' mode of working with AI that Mollick described in 2023 is giving way to a 'co-existence' era of greater AI autonomy — sometimes better than you, sometimes not — in which the real skill is a continuously renegotiated judgment about when to lean on AI, when to refuse it, and when to hand over control entirely, extending even to AI now acting as one's reader, critic, and gatekeeper.
• What we lose when AI writes for us Afonso Franco · 2026-05-25 Reader 🖥️
  When we let AI write for us, we don't merely outsource a technical task — we outsource the cognitive struggle through which we clarify beliefs, form judgment, and constitute the self, and at civilizational scale this risks converging humanity not just on a shared style but on shared thought.
• Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework Marc Millstone · 2026-05 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  The same risk-and-differentiation framework that tells engineering teams where to grant AI autonomy also governs knowledge work like writing: delegate heavily where errors are cheap and recoverable, retain full ownership where the work carries the argument's credibility, and use AI as an adversarial critic rather than a ghostwriter.
• The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher Ernie Svenson · 2026-04-21 Reader 🖥️
  The biggest barrier to getting useful output from AI is not prompting technique but the same problem William Zinsser identified in bad writing — people try to communicate before they have figured out what they actually want to say; therefore the single most leveraged improvement most users can make is to pause and articulate their intent in one clear sentence before they prompt.
• How to write with style Kurt Vonnegut · 1982 Reader 🖥️
  Good writing style is not verbal ornament but the honest self-revelation of a writer who genuinely cares about a worthwhile subject and respects the reader — and it is achieved not through games with language but through caring about content, sounding like the actual person you are, keeping language simple, and cutting anything that does not illuminate the subject.
• How to write clearly Edward T. Thompson · 1979 Reader 🖥️
  Writing clearly is a learnable discipline rather than a gift, and it rests on first thinking clearly: because muddy prose is really muddy thinking, the writer who does the hard work of settling and ordering what to say before writing — then prunes, simplifies, and calibrates everything in the reader's service — can make almost any idea understood with the least possible effort from the reader.

Propositions touching this concept (53)

By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).

1979

• explicitFor anyone who is not a professional poet or novelist, writing well requires only getting your ideas across simply and clearly; you do not need big fancy words or high-flying phrases.
  How to write clearly · p1
• explicitClear writing has only three basic requirements — wanting to write clearly, being willing to work hard, and knowing and following some basic guidelines — so clarity is an attainable discipline, not a rare gift.
  How to write clearly · p2
• explicitStart where your readers are: pitch to their existing knowledge and never above it, because your prime purpose is to explain something, not to prove you are smarter than your readers (and 'writing to a 12-year-old mentality' is insulting, not clear).
  How to write clearly · p4
• explicitBe as brief as possible: condensing almost always makes writing tighter and easier to understand, and it is achieved by learnable techniques (logical order, cutting the known, cutting excess evidence and anecdotes, killing windy phrases, activating passive verbs, dropping the negative) — 'when you've finished, stop.'
  How to write clearly · p6
• implicitUnclear writing is really unclear thinking: because 'thinking means work' and clarity depends on first knowing and ordering what you want to say, writing is a tool that forces and exposes thought, not a neutral pipe that merely transmits ideas already fully formed.
  How to write clearly · p7
• implicitClarity is functionally and almost morally obligatory: to fail to do the work of being clear is to waste the reader's effort and to substitute self-display for service, which the writer has no right to do.
  How to write clearly · p11

1982

• explicitStyle is the sum of the revelations — accidental and intentional — that a piece of writing makes about its writer's character and mind; to read someone's prose is to learn what sort of person they are.
  How to write with style · p1
• explicitYou should examine and improve your writing style as a mark of respect for your readers; careless writing tells readers you care nothing about them, and they will stop reading you.
  How to write with style · p2
• explicitWrite in the voice you grew up with; a writer is trusted most — by himself and by readers — when the writing sounds most like the actual person he is, rather than like an imitated prestige dialect.
  How to write with style · p6
• explicitcorroboratedClarity is a duty owed to a struggling reader: because reading is a difficult art most people never fully master, writers must simplify, keep to familiar forms, and make themselves understood rather than pursue self-indulgent, hard-to-parse innovation.
  How to write with style · p7
• implicitcontestedThe self whose voice a writer should sound like is largely pre-formed by origin and speech-community (childhood, first language); writing reveals and expresses that self rather than creating it.
  How to write with style · p12

2026-04

• explicitZinsser's diagnosis of bad writing — that it is a thinking problem, not a craft problem — applies directly to bad prompting.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher · p2
• implicitPrompting is fundamentally a writing act — a communication problem governed by the same rules of clarity that govern good prose.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher · p9
• implicitdevelopedThe act of articulating intent before prompting is itself a form of thinking — writing-to-think rather than writing-to-output.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher · p10

2026-05

• explicitThe risk-and-differentiation framework for AI autonomy applies not just to engineering but to knowledge work generally, including writing.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework · p1
• explicitdevelopedAI removing a technical barrier (e.g., coding, image generation) is good; AI removing cognitive struggle is bad.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p1
• explicitcorroboratedWriting is thinking — the cognitive struggle of articulation is not separable from the cognitive work of forming beliefs.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p2
• explicitcontestedThe Self is constituted (not merely reported) by the act of writing from a blank page.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p3
• explicitOutsourcing writing to AI outsources self-expression and ultimately self-formation.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p4
• explicitLLM-generated prose has identifiable stylistic markers (short sentences, false dichotomies, anaphora, epistrophe, concrete-to-abstract pivots, em-dashes) that have become pervasive in public writing.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p5
• explicitLinguistic convergence at civilizational scale will produce cognitive convergence — we will start thinking the same, not just sounding the same.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p6
• explicitestablishedRecognizable authorial voice (de Botton, Sapolsky, Cutler, etc.) is evidence of a Self being expressed and is what readers connect to.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p7
• explicitcorroboratedThe friction and discomfort of writing are not bugs but the very mechanism of selfhood.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p9
• implicitWriting is the privileged or unique site of selfhood-formation — other effortful cognitive activities (drawing, coding, conversation, journaling without writing) are not assigned the same role.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p10
• implicitcorroboratedAn author's prose style is a transparent and reliable index of their inner Self.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p11
• implicitCognitive effort and authentic selfhood require self-generated text — text co-produced or AI-edited cannot do the same work, even if the human deliberates over every word.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p12
• implicitPre-AI writing practice was already producing genuine selves at scale (i.e., there was a baseline of authentic selfhood now being eroded).
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p14
• implicitThe reader is, or could be, a person who writes from a blank page — i.e., the audience is people for whom writing is already a self-shaping practice.
  What we lose when AI writes for us · p15

2026-06

• explicitYour inner monologue becomes your outer reality — the most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself about yourself — and both too much self-criticism (which kills ambition) and too much arrogance (which makes you miss things) are failure modes.
  Brain Food: Answers Without Effort · p3
• explicitestablishedWriting an idea out so it stands alone and is cogent forces you to think through more of the problem, figure out the loose ends, and tie them up (Bezos's practice, relayed by Gurley).
  Brain Food: Answers Without Effort · p8
• implicitUnderstanding is non-transferable — a byproduct of the effortful process of arriving, not a portable object that can be handed over — so every route that skips the effort (borrowed conclusions, flattery, single-variable thinking, a chipper self-story) yields a hollow substitute for the real thing.
  Brain Food: Answers Without Effort · p11
• explicitEven the restrained AI use in the book's writing process carried real losses, not just gains: some intellectual struggles may have been resolved too quickly with AI help, and Mollick's own thinking may have been subtly redirected by AI feedback.
  Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence · p10

2026-07

• explicitAI is now better than most people at exactly what school asks students to practice — analysis, writing, and reasoning — so the question is no longer whether AI is good enough for schoolwork.
  Det skal være vanskelig · p2
• explicitWhat atrophies under AI is no longer manual hand-skill but thinking itself — writing, analysis, judgment — and unlike a wobbling plane, there is no alarm that warns your judgment has rusted.
  Det skal være vanskelig · p4
• implicitThe author treats one well-instrumented but ultimately self-reported incident (partly graded by the AI system being critiqued) as sufficient warrant for writing durable, cross-session changes to a standing instruction file.
  The Orchestrator's Tax · p13
• explicitRecognizable 'LLM-speak' increasingly triggers a strong negative visceral reaction in readers, undermining a piece of writing's credibility before its content is even evaluated.
  Fragments: July 21 · p17
• explicitReading a draft aloud ('Say Your Writing') helps writers preserve an individual voice and resist AI-homogenized prose, because speech patterns track a person's authentic self more closely than a polished written draft does.
  Fragments: July 21 · p19
• explicitThe real reasons she hasn't published her thinking are not busyness but three self-imposed habits: overthinking, moving too fast to the next idea before finishing the last one, and assuming it needs to be more polished than it does.
  Why I'm Writing Rachel's Ramblings · p2
• explicit'Rachel's Ramblings' is designed as fast, imperfect, thinking-out-loud writing that names ideas early rather than waiting for them to be fully formed, because most of her day-to-day work is spotting patterns and asking not-yet-answered questions rather than answering known ones.
  Why I'm Writing Rachel's Ramblings · p3
• explicitWriting publicly functions as a forcing function that converts her associative, 'knowledge-graph-like' pattern-matching thinking — useful in conversation and client work — into something that exists outside her head and can be examined, challenged, and refined.
  Why I'm Writing Rachel's Ramblings · p4

2026-08

• explicitIndependent, non-self-referential verification (generated tests that filter proposed fixes, adversarial critic review, targeted repair of identified defects) catches requirement and specification problems more reliably than simply writing a longer or more detailed specification, per the cited studies on ambiguity repair (~31% improvement), SWT-Bench (doubled precision), and natural-language-to-TLA+ translation (~27%/9% syntactic/semantic correctness).
  When AI Writes the Code, Specifications Need an Exit Strategy · p11

2026-09

• explicitBy 2030, IT's role shifts from writing an organization's code to running a governed, self-service enablement platform, with IT teams managing thousands of internal apps built by non-engineers.
  Presentation: A Few Predicted Talks From QConAI 2030 · p8
• explicitWriting is not merely a record of a thought that already existed complete before the writing began; it is one of the ways thinking itself happens.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p1
• explicitEven when a writer already knows a subject well, the act of writing can trigger new ideas or discoveries that were not present before writing began.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p2
• explicitA thought, before it is written, is typically less precise than the sentence eventually used to express it; writing forces determinate choices (is it A or B, is this always true or only sometimes, is this a cause or a correlation) that a pre-verbal thought does not require.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p3
• explicitAttempting to explain, in writing, something you believe you understand well often reveals that the understanding is less complete than it felt before writing.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p5
• explicitWriting differs cognitively from speaking because a writer lacks the shared situational context and real-time feedback a speaker has, and so must make relationships between ideas explicit that speech can leave implicit.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p6
• explicitBecause writing persists (unlike speech, which disappears), it becomes a stable external object the writer can return to later and disagree with, in a way an unwritten thought cannot be revisited.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p7
• explicitWriting offloads relationships among multiple ideas (e.g., A causes B, B depends on C, C is the same as A) from working memory onto an inspectable external surface, making contradictions visible without requiring active mental recall.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p8
• explicitWriting an article can correct an author's original argument, not merely communicate it — starting from one claim and, through the act of writing and encountering counterexamples, arriving at a substantively different claim.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p10
• explicitCode artifacts — class names, method names, tests, APIs, domain models, architecture documents, database schemas — are themselves forms of writing, in that each gives something implicit in someone's head an inspectable, arguable external form.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p12
• implicitThe value of engaging (in writing) with an idea that has "already been said" lies not in the novelty of its content but in whether the writer can see it differently; genuine personal understanding of an idea — even an old, familiar one — is typically only reached by struggling to put it into words oneself, not by reading about it or agreeing with it.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p13
• explicitWriting is a learned skill, distinct from speech (which is acquired naturally in growing up), that requires deliberately learning to structure an argument, make distinctions, and avoid becoming too attached to an earlier draft, because the thought captured in it is still developing.
  Writing vs. Thinking · p14

Open gaps (38)

• incompleteNo consideration of who this doesn't work for — people who dislike writing, lack private or free-handed moments (open-plan jobs, caregiving), or find handwriting effortful. The single-case, self-selected sample (a person already inclined toward journaling and commonplacing) is presented as a generalizable ten-point method.
  10 uses for a pocket notebook to keep you off your phone — read next: Compare with extract-uten-kontroll#g2 (a single self-diagnosed case generalized to 'a whole generation') for the parallel generalizability problem.
• incompleteNo mechanism for how lived experience becomes transmissible work. The load-bearing premise — that experience filtered through a distinctive voice 'turns into meaning others can access', converting secondhand to firsthand — is asserted but never examined, and the recursion it creates (the reader receiving his transmitted meaning is then holding secondhand experience) is never addressed. This is the essay's central unexamined move and the point where an anti-hype reader will feel the truism.
  The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams — read next: Read the corpus's transmission-problem thread — ki-utvikling-og-folelser (how the next generation acquires craft), you-cant-unit-test-for-taste (where taste comes from / how it transmits) and svenson-attention-real-skill-ai-prompts (names the decisive skill, offers no method) — alongside Polanyi on tacit knowledge (does lived experience transmit at all?). Frame as infrastructure for getting lived experience *through* into distinctive, transmissible work, not as motivation.
• incompleteThe essay is secondhand advice, built on a secondhand fictional artifact, arguing against secondhand material; it survives only by silently reclassifying 'secondhand-through-a-distinctive-voice' as firsthand. That substitution relocates the real claim from 'firsthand experience matters' to 'distinctiveness of perspective matters' — two things that can come apart (and that AI-augmented work might also carry) — but the move is never made explicit or defended.
  The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams — read next: Read on performative / self-referential contradiction and test whether distinctiveness of voice, not novel firsthand experience, is the actual operative variable. Cross with eating-my-own-dog-food (human-originated seed vs prompt-generated framework) and franco-what-we-lose-when-ai-writes (voice as evidence of a Self) to see whether 'voice' can be specified independently of 'lived experience.'
• incompleteFirsthand vs secondhand is treated as a hard binary, but all human work recombines absorbed (secondhand) inputs — everyone's 'little life moments' are themselves saturated with others' content — and AI can also prompt, augment or occasion genuine firsthand experience. The essay admits no continuum and no role for AI as a spur to real experience rather than a substitute for it.
  The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams — read next: Read dawkins-claude-delusion (which flags exactly this sharp mimicry/genuine-experience binary as a weakness) and the taste article; probe where on the continuum 'your own LLM' actually sits, and where AI functions as a prompt for firsthand experience rather than a replacement of it.
• incomplete'It's all art' universalizes the firsthand-experience premium to every kind of knowledge work, colliding with the essay's own art-vs-science distinction (some work is a reproducible search for external truth — explicitly NOT art). The piece never marks where the claim stops applying, leaving an inspiring but unfalsifiable exhortation — a live risk given the creator/marketing register in which it is written.
  The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams — read next: Read Adler on separating a practical exhortation from a testable claim, and ask which categories of work the firsthand-experience premium genuinely governs versus where reproducible correctness — not distinctive voice — is what the audience needs (cf. the taste article's correctness-vs-quality axis, where 'correct' and 'good' come apart in the opposite direction).
• self-assessment biasThe author is grading his own framework by applying it to his own work. There is no external validation, no second writer replicating the quadrant assignments independently, and no reader-side evidence that the framework-guided post is actually stronger than a counterfactual version. The self-referential structure is rhetorically clever but epistemically circular.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework — read next: Independent case studies applying the framework; A/B testing of framework-guided vs. unguided AI-assisted writing.
• scopeThe demonstration covers exactly one genre (persuasive long-form essay) by one expert writer. No evidence is offered that the quadrant assignments would hold for other knowledge work types -- technical documentation, code review, strategic memos, creative writing -- where risk and differentiation profiles differ.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework — read next: Apply the framework to diverse knowledge work outputs and check whether quadrant assignments remain stable.
• mechanismThe post does not explain how a practitioner should determine which quadrant a given piece of work falls into. The author's assignments feel intuitive but the decision criteria are not made explicit enough for someone else to replicate them.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework — read next: The parent post 'Don't Automate Your Moat' may provide the missing decision criteria; worth checking.
• counterfactualNo comparison to what would have happened without the framework. The author asserts the framework guided his delegation decisions, but an experienced writer might have made similar choices by instinct. The framework's marginal value over general editorial judgment is not demonstrated.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework — read next: Studies on structured decision-making vs. expert intuition in creative/knowledge work.
• incompleteThe adversarial-critic prompt pattern is presented as highly effective but with only anecdotal evidence from one use case. The failure modes of this approach (model sycophancy despite hostile persona, critique that is adversarial in tone but generic in substance) are not explored.
  Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework — read next: Research on LLM sycophancy and the reliability of adversarial prompting for substantive critique.
• incompleteThe essay treats the AI as a passive instrument that 'follows your lead.' This was largely true for early single-shot text generation but is increasingly false for frontier models that ask clarifying questions, offer alternatives, and probe for missing intent. The advice still helps, but the underlying model of AI behavior is dated.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher — read next: Recent work on clarifying-question behaviors in agentic models; Anthropic's writing on Claude's interrogative defaults; research on mixed-initiative interaction
• incompleteSvenson excludes the exploratory use case in which the user genuinely does not yet know what they want and is using the AI as a thinking partner to find out. This is one of the most valuable uses of LLMs — and it is precisely the case where the Zinsser test would tell you not to prompt yet, which would be bad advice.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher — read next: Andy Matuschak on tools for thought; literature on writing-to-think (Zinsser himself elsewhere acknowledges this); research on using LLMs as brainstorming partners
• incompleteThe universal claim that intent-clarity dominates all technique is asserted but not measured. Different users at different skill levels likely face different bottlenecks — some are blocked by vague intent, others by context-loading, others by inability to evaluate outputs. The essay's one-size-fits-all framing under-serves users whose bottleneck is elsewhere.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher — read next: Empirical studies on prompt-quality factors; segmentation of AI-user skill levels (novice/intermediate/advanced) in productivity research
• incompleteThe analogy presumes that writing-craft principles transfer cleanly to prompting because both are 'communication.' But writing is human-to-human communication with shared context and reading conventions; prompting is human-to-model communication with very different priors, failure modes, and feedback loops. The essay does not stress-test where the analogy breaks.
  The Best Prompting Advice Came From a Writing Teacher — read next: Cognitive science of human-AI communication; research on shared common ground in conversation (Herbert Clark); the literature on prompting as distinct from natural-language instruction
• incompleteFowler's argument against ever letting an LLM touch one's prose — even just for suggestions — doesn't resolve the accessibility tension he himself raises: writers for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language may face a much larger cost from foregoing AI assistance than the cost of a slight loss of stylistic purity. He flags this tension ('It's too easy for me to neglect to think about a difficulty that I've never been able to face') but proposes no alternative practice for those writers.
  Fragments: July 21 — read next: Practitioner writing specifically from non-native-English technical writers on their experience with and without LLM assistance, and any evidence on whether 'Say Your Writing' works as well for L2 writers as it does for Fowler.
• uninformedThe cited 75.33% law-professor preference finding for LLM answers over peer instructors is reported without the students'-side outcome (whether students who received LLM answers actually learned better or worse), the specific sample of contract-law questions used, or which models were tested — details that materially affect how far the finding generalizes beyond 'LLMs write plausible short answers professors like reading.'
  Fragments: July 21 — read next: Read the original Stanford Law study directly for full methodology and any student-learning-outcome measures, and check for replication in other legal or technical education domains.
• incompleteFranco never distinguishes operationally between AI-as-editor and AI-as-author. He gestures at 'co-creator' and 'sparring partner' but offers no test for when LLM involvement has crossed from helping you think to thinking for you. Since the whole prescription hinges on this line, its absence is the essay's central structural weakness.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: Andy Matuschak's notes on evergreen-note writing and 'understanding requires effortful engagement'; Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (the operational case for note-writing as thinking); literature on cognitive offloading (Risko & Gilbert) for empirical traction on which kinds of offloading degrade what kinds of cognition.
• incompleteThe implicit theory of selfhood is constructivist (writing constitutes the Self) but Franco never engages alternatives: that selfhood is constituted in speech (Charles Taylor, dialogical self), in action (Aristotelian), in narrative across many modalities (Ricoeur), or that the 'Self' being expressed by his authorial gallery is a cultivated public persona rather than an inner essence.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another; Sönke Ahrens on writing-as-thinking; and contra: Cal Newport / classical-rhetoric arguments for speech and dialectic as primary.
• incompleteThe argument from stylistic convergence to cognitive convergence is the most consequential claim in the essay and is unsupported. Franco asserts it ('we converge around rhetoric, what happens then?') but provides no mechanism. A Sapir-Whorf-style claim is doing the work uncited.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: Linguistic relativity literature (Lera Boroditsky, Guy Deutscher); studies of LLM influence on user vocabulary and reasoning (e.g., recent work on 'epistemic homogenization' in LLM-assisted writing); Stolen Focus (Hari) on attention-environment shaping cognition.
• incompleteNo engagement with the possibility that LLM-mediated reflection can be MORE rigorous than solo blank-page writing for some people — e.g., neurodivergent users for whom externalized dialogue scaffolds rather than replaces thought; or that writing from a blank page is itself a culturally specific Western Romantic ideal.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: Literature on extended cognition; disability/neurodivergence and AI-assistance; the rhetoric tradition (which privileges dialogue and topoi over solitary blank-page composition).
• illogicalSelf-undermining performance: Franco demonstrates LLM-style techniques 'on his own' (the anaphora caveat) to prove he can do them without an LLM. But this concedes that the techniques themselves are not the marker of AI authorship — humans use them too. If the stylistic tells are not in fact diagnostic, the empirical claim ('humanity's writing style') is weaker than asserted.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: Studies on inter-rater reliability of human/AI text detection; the history of these rhetorical figures (which long predate LLMs).
• uninformedThe essay treats LLM-induced stylistic homogenization as historically novel. Prior waves of stylistic dominance (AP style, MBA-speak, SEO writing, business-jargon, Strunk-and-White) produced their own convergences without producing the cognitive collapse Franco fears — suggesting style-to-thought transmission may be weaker than claimed.
  What we lose when AI writes for us — read next: History of plain-style movements (Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language'); style guide history; sociolinguistics of register convergence.
• incompleteThe Norwegian / Lean-Norwegian context is implicit but not theorised. The åremål concept comes from Norwegian political and academic life and is being repurposed for engineering leadership. The fagtid concept has roots in Norwegian work-culture autonomy ideas. The DORA / Lean / Toyota convergence Truls names at the end is itself partially a Nordic management-culture convergence. There is a comparative essay latent here that the episode does not write.
  5) Vidar Moe: Det eneste Vidar vil er å ha det lett — read next: Read in parallel with NAV's 'optimizing for fast flow' piece (already in the user's queue), with Norwegian Self-Determination Theory–inflected management writing (autonomi, mestring, mening), and with the wider tradition of Nordic engineering culture vs. anglophone agile-at-scale. The user's coding-agents corpus already includes Nils Brede Moe (no relation? — but a Nordic empirical-software-engineering voice in the same neighbourhood, including the upcoming Heis episode 9).
• incompleteThe method assumes a single, fixed message that already exists, whole, before writing begins -- 'you know where you will stop before you start.' It has no place for exploratory or discovery writing, in which the point emerges only through the act of drafting. This is in tension with Thompson's own implicit 'clear writing = clear thinking': he treats thinking as prior to and separable from writing (think via the cards, then transcribe), whereas the writing-as-thinking tradition holds that writing IS the thinking, and that outlining-first can only help once the hard cognitive work is already done.
  How to write clearly — read next: Read Peter Elbow 'Writing With Power' and Sonke Ahrens 'How to Take Smart Notes' (Zettelkasten) on writing as thinking-to-discover, and Franco 'What we lose when AI writes for us' on writing as constituting (not merely reporting) a view -- against Thompson's think-first-then-write separation.
• incomplete'Clarity' is treated as always achievable by simplification, but some subjects are irreducibly complex, uncertain, or essentially ambiguous, and faithful writing must preserve that -- flattening them into one clean surface reading can falsify. Every Thompson exemplar (all the fish died; the cherry tree) is a subject where nothing complex is lost; none tests the claim against genuinely conceptual or contested material.
  How to write clearly — read next: Read Ousterhout on essential vs. accidental complexity and deep-simple vs. simplistic, and technical-writing / explanation-theory work on rendering irreducible complexity without falsifying it -- to see where 'be clear' shades into 'oversimplify.'
• incompleteThe essay is pre-digital and pre-collaborative: it prescribes clarity as a solo writer's individual discipline, yet its own proof texts ('Notice how WE edited this', 'Condensing, as Reader's Digest does it') reveal that the exemplary clear prose is the product of a collective editorial apparatus. It says nothing about writing with editors, collaborators, revision tooling, or (now) AI drafting assistants -- the very machinery that actually produces the 'condensed' Digest style it holds up as the model.
  How to write clearly — read next: Read on editorial process and collaborative revision (how Reader's Digest condensing actually worked as a pipeline), and current work on AI-assisted drafting where the outline-first and condense steps are negotiated with a machine rather than performed alone.
• incomplete'Start where your readers are -- how much do they know?' assumes a single, knowable audience with an identifiable common level of knowledge (natural for a mass magazine with an imagined 'average reader'). It gives no guidance for heterogeneous or unknown audiences -- the default condition of digital publishing -- where readers span wildly different priors and there is no one level to start from.
  How to write clearly — read next: Read on writing for mixed audiences and layered/progressive-disclosure documents (letting expert and novice readers each take the path suited to them) rather than a single pitched level.
• incompleteThe essay is entirely of the print-essay era: it says nothing about digital, collaborative, or AI-assisted writing. Its whole model — a single author revealing a single self to a reader — does not touch what 'sounding like yourself' or 'style as self-revelation' mean when text can be machine-generated, co-written, or stylistically homogenized at scale.
  How to write with style — read next: Read against Franco 'What we lose when AI writes for us' (style/voice as the Self, and its convergence under AI), Acunzo 'The best response to AI slop' (distinctive firsthand voice as the non-commoditizable signal), and the taste article (correctness vs. quality when a machine produces the prose).
• incomplete'Sound like yourself' is under-specified to the point of circularity for a novice: it presupposes an already-articulate, trustworthy voice worth sounding like, and locates that voice in one's origin and childhood speech rather than in any developable skill. It offers no method for a beginner whose natural voice is inarticulate or undeveloped to find or grow one.
  How to write with style — read next: Read a pedagogy-of-voice source (Zinsser 'On Writing Well', Peter Elbow's 'Writing With Power') and the deliberate-practice literature on how voice is cultivated rather than inherited.
• incompleteThe simplicity argument generalizes from emotional profundity to all profundity. Every exemplar (Hamlet's soliloquy, Joyce's 'She was tired', Genesis) is emotional or narrative depth rendered plainly; none is a technically or conceptually irreducible subject. The claim that childlike simplicity fits 'the most profound subjects' may not survive contact with domains whose complexity is essential, not incidental.
  How to write with style — read next: Read Ousterhout on essential vs. accidental complexity and the difference between deep-simple and simplistic; explanation theory / technical-writing craft on rendering irreducible complexity without falsifying it.
• incompleteThe claim that non-standard voice is 'delightful' assumes a reader who is charmed by it ('like a very pretty girl with one eye green and one blue'), with no account of the many contexts where non-standard or regional voice is penalized rather than trusted. 'Sound like yourself' is treated as costless, which may reflect the privilege of a canonical author rather than the situation of a writer whose authentic voice carries real reputational cost.
  How to write with style — read next: Read sociolinguistics on prestige dialects and linguistic discrimination, and the literature on code-switching, to see where authentic voice is a liability rather than a delight.
• incompleteThe post diagnoses three blocking habits (overthinking, moving too fast to the next idea, excess polish) but proposes one fix (write fast and imperfectly) that addresses the first and third directly while leaving the second — abandoning ideas before finishing them — essentially unaddressed; a 'fast and imperfect' format could just as easily amplify that habit (more half-finished fragments) as cure it.
  Why I'm Writing Rachel's Ramblings — read next: Her own later posts in the same series, to see whether individual 'ramblings' get revisited/developed or stay as one-off fragments — a question only answerable by reading forward in the series.
• incompleteNo counter-scenario for FDE demand. The forecast assumes integration friction stays high. The opposite trajectory — better agent tooling, MCP, vendor-native deployment workflows — could compress the FDE role within a few cycles.
  The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again — read next: Read MCP/agentic-deployment writing and self-serve enterprise AI adoption case studies. Watch for evidence that successful AI rollouts increasingly don't need embedded engineers — that would falsify the forecast.
• incompleteNo engagement with counterexamples: people who reason clearly and reach genuine understanding without writing (highly verbal thinkers, oral-tradition reasoning, live discussion, REPL/interactive exploration), or via other externalization media (sketching, diagramming, talking through an idea with someone else). The essay treats writing as uniquely load-bearing for thought without considering whether other externalization forms achieve the same clarifying effect — or, more strongly, whether some people think well with no externalization at all.
  Writing vs. Thinking — read next: Read against extract-franco-what-we-lose-when-ai-writes#g4, which raises exactly this question (drawing, coding, deliberating aloud, longhand journaling, careful prompting as possible substitutes for writing) and points to embodied/extended-cognition literature (Andy Clark) as a place to look for an answer.
• incompleteThe causal mechanism by which externalization aids cognition is asserted via the A/B/C example and a passing Vygotsky citation, but never grounded or disambiguated: is it working-memory-limit relief (a cognitive-load account), distributed/extended cognition (the page becoming part of the cognitive system), or simply the discipline of grammar forcing precision? The essay gestures at all three without saying which is doing the causal work, or whether they are the same mechanism described three different ways.
  Writing vs. Thinking — read next: Would benefit from engagement with extended-mind theory (Clark & Chalmers) or working-memory research, rather than relying on introspective anecdote and one name-dropped citation.
• incompleteThe claim that code is "another form of writing" — and therefore does the same thinking work as prose — is asserted by declaration rather than independently argued. The essay never explains why writing code should activate the same cognitive process as writing prose, rather than being a related but distinct discipline (e.g., naming partly constrained by compiler/type-system rules and existing conventions, not by the same open-ended "what do I actually mean" question prose poses).
  Writing vs. Thinking — read next: Compare with extract-software-design-agentic-age-placing-bets#p11 on why human-legible naming and Ubiquitous Language matter functionally — that argument grounds the claim in shared-language requirements across code/docs/conversation rather than in a cognitive-process equivalence with prose writing.
• uninformedNo engagement with the existing literature this essay's claims overlap heavily with — writing-to-learn research in composition studies, extended-mind theory (Clark & Chalmers), or Zettelkasten-style "note-taking as thinking" work (e.g., Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes) — beyond one passing reference to Vygotsky.
  Writing vs. Thinking
• illogicalThe essay's own practice is not obviously exempt from the problem it describes: it is itself a credible-looking piece of content (citations, footnotes, historical erudition) written by an author who elsewhere admits using Claude 'to help me editorialize and think through my ideas,' and its closing line ('Maybe ask Claude?') jokes past, rather than resolves, whether AI-assisted argumentative writing should be gated or trusted any differently than the AI-generated bug reports or papers it condemns.
  You Probably Won’t Read This Article…and That’s OK — read next: extract-franco-what-we-lose-when-ai-writes takes the harder version of this same self-exemption question head-on (whether AI-assisted writing degrades authorial selfhood/credibility).