--- title: "Co-writing with AI, without the slop" date: 2026-05-13 tags: [claude, ai, writing, blog-workflow, opinion] summary: How I draft blog posts with Claude as a co-writer. Markers, /tagore, and a human pass at the end. The "ghostwriter" framing doesn't quite fit. "Co-writer" does. aliases: [co-writing-with-ai, claude-co-writer, ai-co-writing] --- I use AI to help write this blog. Shocking, I know. It's 2026. My fridge probably uses AI to schedule its own defrost cycle, the toaster has a personality, and at this point if a blog post wasn't at least partly drafted by a language model, that's the unusual case. ## How I do it I usually write an excerpt or the rough idea myself, drop it into a prompt with markers like `(Claude note: expand on this with X or Y)`, run [`/tagore`](https://github.com/apurvrdx1/tagore) over the result, and then go back through it myself because tagore doesn't catch everything and I have opinions about how a sentence should land. I check every post myself, Vince the human ;-), before it ships. That's it. That's the whole workflow. ## Is that shocking? Does it kill the human element? I don't think so. The part I write first is the load-bearing piece: the hot take, the structure, the specific examples, what I want to say. The model expands it, fills in transitions, suggests phrasing I wouldn't have reached for, and then I edit the parts that landed wrong. The opinions are mine. The choice to publish is mine. "Proofreader" undersells it. Proofreading is comma placement and dangling modifiers, and Claude does a lot more than that. It offers ways to phrase a paragraph that I'd never have written but, once I read it, I recognise as the thing I was trying to say. "Ghostwriter" overshoots. Ghostwriters write the whole thing while the named author signs off. Neither fits. Co-writer is the word. Funny timing: Anthropic recently launched [Claude Cowork](https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork), which is roughly the same framing: Claude as someone you collaborate with on the actual work, not as an oracle you query. Different product, same idea. Stop pretending the AI is a vending machine and start treating it like the smart colleague who's read everything and types fast. ## The hot take The "AI vs human writing" frame is the wrong one in 2026. The interesting question is whether anyone thought about the writing before publishing. Whether a human typed it or a model drafted it matters much less. A model can produce a thousand competent-but-soulless posts a day. A human can also produce a thousand competent-but-soulless posts a day. Look at any content marketing pipeline from 2018. Neither is interesting. What I notice when I read good writing now is that the author had a point of view, picked the specific examples that matter, and trusted the reader. None of that depends on whether a human or a model wrote the first draft. Pure-human writing with no point of view is just as boring as pure-AI writing with no point of view. The collaboration model, where the human supplies opinion and judgment and the model supplies fluency, produces better stuff than either does alone, provided you do the judgment part instead of mass-accepting the suggestions. So no, AI didn't take the human out of writing. It took the typing out. Which, honestly, was always the boring part. ## The practical upside This setup lets me publish faster, and from places where I'd never normally bother to draft. A post like this one can start as a phone-typed lump of thoughts on the train, get expanded against my usual workflow, run through tagore, and end up reviewable by the time I'm home. That used to be a half-day's work at a laptop. Now it's an evening with the laptop just for the edit pass. The blog you're reading exists because the friction of writing a post dropped enough that I do it at all. That, on its own, would be enough to justify the workflow. Everything else is upside. ## Related - [[using-ai-for-coding]]. The same thinking, applied to code instead of prose. ## References - [`/tagore` on GitHub](https://github.com/apurvrdx1/tagore)