I used AI to write about block’s layoffs. Jack Dorsey’s response proved my point.
Over the weekend, I published an article about Block’s massive layoffs. For an account my size (~5k followers), the reach was outsized. It struck a nerve. Including with Jack Dorsey.
Then others piled on. The primary dismissal: “This was written by AI.”
What’s hard to reconcile is that on the one hand most are saying: AI is getting so good it can code, it can create, it’s coming for our jobs. That’s the consensus view. Fine. Yet in seemingly the same breath they are criticizing its use in a post.
If AI is that capable, I’d argue that the best and brightest would be negligent to their own careers if they didn’t use it. The real critique shouldn’t be aimed at people who use AI to sharpen their writing. It should be aimed at people who somehow still don’t.
I’m not defending AI slop. Let’s define what slop actually is: poorly prompted, reductive, meandering content that says nothing with a lot of words. I hate it. When I see it, I dismiss it immediately.
But “I noticed some AI writing tics in your post” is a stylistic observation. It’s separate from the substance. And nobody who piled on actually engaged with the substance: that AI is not yet being utilized at most large companies in ways that justify mass layoffs. That the real story at Block and many companies over 5,000 employees is years of corporate bloat getting corrected, with AI as convenient narrative cover.
Dismiss the style if you want. But engage with the argument.
Here’s my actual process.
I’ve spent weeks building detailed context documents about my thinking, tone, frameworks, and strategic perspective into a library that Claude can reference. When I have an idea, I start with a voice note. I dictate my raw thinking, feed the transcription into Claude alongside all that context, and a first draft is done in minutes. Not days. Minutes. From there, I work the draft with Claude, thought by thought, paragraph by paragraph, until it’s ready to publish.
Last week’s article wouldn’t have existed without this workflow. My schedule that week was wall-to-wall meetings and family obligations. There’s no version of reality where I write and publish that piece by Saturday morning without these tools. Because I had the infrastructure set up, I compressed idea to publication. And the piece resonated. Nearly 400k views and counting.
The irony should be obvious. This is what AI unlocks: new voices entering the discourse who have relevant knowledge and perspective but couldn’t previously justify the time investment of long-form writing. The same way AI is enabling people who couldn’t code to build applications, it’s enabling people with deep domain expertise to get their ideas into the world.
The best writers who’ve dedicated their careers to the craft might not love this. I get it. But for those of us sitting on years of hard-won perspective we want to share, this workflow has completely changed the equation. The gatekeeping of “you must artisanally hand-craft every word you publish” is the same energy as telling someone they can’t ship an app or website because they didn’t learn C++ and have a strong view on tabs or spaces.
The ideas matter. The perspective matters. And the tools are evolving whether you like it or not.
It goes without saying that I used AI to help write this post, too.