Compound Writing: The Ultimate Guide

Use AI to make better editorial decisions, and carry what you learn into the next story

Katie Parrott

GPT

Writing is part of most jobs. You’re expected to explain a complicated decision to your team, make a case for a project, or write a newsletter someone will want to read. Having something to say is a start. Figuring out how to say it—and whether it makes sense to anyone outside your own head—takes work. Doing all that without an editor—which I’m lucky enough to have but most jobs don’t come with—is even harder.

AI can help. It can interview you to draw out an idea, suggest ways to organize your thoughts, draft a passage, or point out where your explanation loses the reader. If you’re still developing confidence as a writer, that gives you somewhere to begin and feedback to work with. If you write professionally, it gives you more ways to test an argument, experiment with an unfamiliar form, or question a habit you’ve stopped noticing.

I’m a professional writer, and I use AI for all of those things. But my early approach to collaborating with the tools involved a lot of repetition: explaining what I wanted, correcting the output, and doing it all over again with the next piece. I could get a draft I was happy with, but I had to start from zero every time.

Compound Writing is the methodology and toolkit I built to make each writing session smoother than the last. It packages the methods I use into a plugin—a collection of reusable instructions for an AI agent such as Claude Code or Codex. Those instructions guide the agent through jobs like interviewing, outlining, drafting, and reviewing. Alongside them, you keep files with examples of your writing and guidance about your voice and editorial standards. When a session teaches you something worth using again, you update that guidance.

The back-and-forth is still writing. You decide whether a question is useful, an argument holds up, or a sentence sounds like something you would say. The advantage is having help available throughout the process, with methods and context you can refine instead of recreating them for every assignment. You can also write every word of a piece yourself and use the agent only for questions and feedback.

This guide will show you how to set up the toolkit and use it on a piece of writing you care about finishing. We’ll follow one of my essays from the Working Overtime column, “Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think,” from brainstorming through revision, including the suggestions I rejected. You’ll see what to prepare before you start, what happens while you write, and how to save what you learn for the next piece.

There are as many ways to write with AI as there are people writing with AI. This is one way, heavily grounded in how I approach and think about writing—from my 13 years of professional writing experience and two years writing about writing with AI. But someone else could start from the same beginning—“Adapt compound engineering for writing”—and come to a completely different endpoint. That’s the beauty of a creative process.

Read with Claude Read with ChatGPT

What Compound Writing is—and what it isn’t

What it is

A methodology. A way to work through a piece from the first idea to publication, with review and learning built into the process. You develop the material, shape it into a draft, assess what works, and save the lessons that will give the next piece a better starting point.
A toolkit. The compound writing plugin gives Claude Code or Codex reusable skills for interviewing, outlining, drafting, reviewing, and refining your work. You can call one skill for a specific problem or ask the agent to combine several around the piece you’re trying to write.
A “writing gym.” The skills give you ways to practice by asking questions and pushing on your ideas. You choose where to dig in with the model and which parts of the work to do yourself.

What it isn’t

A vending machine. If you expect to type one prompt and receive a finished piece that feels true to you, you’re in for disappointment. Writing with AI takes extensive back and forth with the model. You answer and reject questions, negotiate the outline, compare drafts, correct its interpretation of your sources, and rewrite language that doesn’t say what you mean. That exchange is part of the AI-native writing process.
Compound Engineering. Compound Writing grew from Compound Engineering and borrows its loop of doing, reviewing, and saving lessons. But code often supplies deterministic, yes-or-no checks on functionality: A test passes or fails; a function returns the expected value or it doesn’t. For a clearly specified task, those checks can let you delegate implementation, walk away, and review the result. Writing has factual and mechanical checks, but whether an argument convinces, a joke lands, or a sentence sounds like you is subjective and qualitative. Two editors can agree that a paragraph is accurate and disagree about whether it works. Compound Writing asks you to stay close to the work, shaping the argument and language through repeated exchanges with the model.

Compound Writing: The methodology

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The core loop

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