How I taught AI to write for me
You might be surprised to hear this, but newsletters like the one you're reading? I knock them out in about 10 minutes, more or less.
My life motto is basically "work smart, not hard."
But let's be clear: that often gets misunderstood. It doesn't mean don’t work, ignore output quality, or just phone it in. Far from it.
The real key to working smart is doing exceptional work upfront so that everything that follows becomes significantly easier.
So, how do I create a relatively long-form piece of content like this, packed with (hopefully!) value, in just 10 minutes?
Here’s the breakdown:
The Foundation: I wrote the first 5 or so newsletters completely manually. No shortcuts, just pure effort to get the message and style right.
The Analysis: I checked which ones got the best feedback and results. I looked at opens, clicks, and replies.
The Benchmark: I chose the top 3 performing newsletters to be my reference point – the gold standard for my style.
The Engine: Then, I created a specific prompt designed to teach AI. The goal? To learn my exact style, tone of voice, formatting preferences, sentence structure – everything – directly from those successful examples.
The Workflow: Now, I can take a rough brain dump – badly formatted, random thoughts, missing parts, typos and all (like the draft for this post!) – and use the AI, trained on my best work, to structure and refine it.
The trick isn't just using AI; it's making the AI sound like me.
Most generic AI content generators rely on bland templates. They might sound good, but they rarely sound authentic. They don't capture your unique voice, experience, or perspective.
You need high-quality, personalized learning material for the AI. That's the secret sauce to making it an effective assistant, not just a content mill. And even then, I’m using 3 different models at the same time because even though Gemini 2.5 Pro is the absolute killer these days, it’s worth comparing and editing using GPT-4.1 or Claude Sonnet 3.7 to make sure we get the best our AI overlords have to offer.
It allows me to maintain quality and my unique voice, while drastically cutting down the "grunt work" time of drafting and polishing.
Don't just take my word for it. I actually recorded a time-lapse of me writing this exact newsletter using this method in just over 7 minutes.
See? Smart work, built on hard work done earlier.
If you want to test the prompt I mentioned before that lets me do this, I’m implementing my prompts into an app and a few first beta testers will get unlimited content generation, for free.
Reply with a “wannabe” to this email if you want to be one of them. Or with anything else, really. I don’t care, I’m not an AI yet ;)
Have a great week!