I Treat AI Like a Co-Writer, Not a Vending Machine

I watched someone give up on AI in under ninety seconds once.

They typed a prompt, hit enter, read the response, and closed the tab. "It just doesn't sound like me." Fair. But here's the thing nobody told them: it wasn't supposed to sound like them yet. That was draft one. They treated it like a vending machine. Put in a prompt, get out a finished product, and if the snack that drops isn't exactly what you wanted, kick the machine and walk away.

I don't work that way. I treat AI like a co-writer.

The vending machine mindset is the whole problem

A vending machine gives you exactly one shot. You pick a number, you get a snack, end of transaction. There's no going back and saying "actually, make that one less salty."

That's how most people use AI, and it's why most people think AI writing sounds generic. They ask for a LinkedIn post, get something serviceable but flat, and either post it as is or abandon the tool entirely. Neither of those is the move.

A co-writer is different. A co-writer hands you a draft and expects you to talk back.

What a real working session looks like

Here's roughly how it goes when I'm actually building something with Claude, not just extracting a first draft and calling it done.

First pass comes back. It's fine. It's also 40% too long and uses the word "synergy," which I have never said out loud in my life and never will.

So I say something like: "that's too long, cut it by a third." Then: "I don't use words like synergy, replace it with something simpler." Then, because the rhythm still feels off: "this doesn't sound like me, rewrite it in my tone, shorter sentences, more direct."

None of that is a magic instruction. It's just feedback. The same feedback you'd give a human collaborator who handed you a draft that wasn't quite right yet. You wouldn't fire them over one draft. You'd tell them what's off and let them take another pass.

That's step 8 in the workflow I built, aiDNA, out of ten steps for actually using AI well: Draft and Refine. It's not the flashy step. There's no clever setup, no research phase, no fancy context document. It's just: you got a draft, now work it.

Why this actually matters

Here's what changes when you shift from vending machine to co-writer.

You stop expecting perfection on the first try, which means you stop getting disappointed and quitting after one attempt. You start noticing what specifically is off, too formal, too long, wrong word, wrong energy, instead of a vague "this isn't it." And naming the specific problem is what actually gets you a better second draft. Vague feedback gets vague revisions. Specific feedback gets specific fixes.

I've had sessions where it took four or five rounds of back and forth to get a piece that actually sounded like me. Not because the tool was bad. Because writing that sounds like a real person takes real iteration, whether a human is doing it alone or working with an AI collaborator. Nobody writes a perfect first draft solo either. Why would adding AI to the mix suddenly skip that step?

A note on what this isn't

This isn't about finding the one perfect prompt that gets it right in a single shot. That's not how any of this works, and honestly, chasing the perfect one-shot prompt is its own kind of vending machine thinking. You're still hoping one input produces one flawless output.

The move is building a rhythm. Draft, react, redirect, draft again. It's closer to editing a piece with a colleague than issuing a command to a machine.

Try this on your next draft

Next time you get an AI draft that isn't right, don't rewrite the whole prompt from scratch. Talk to the draft instead. Tell it what's too long. Tell it which word feels wrong and why. Tell it whose voice it should sound like instead.

Then give it another round. And maybe another after that.

The people getting genuinely good, personal-sounding writing out of AI aren't the ones with the cleverest single prompt. They're the ones willing to sit in the back and forth long enough to get somewhere real. That's not a shortcut. It's just how collaboration works, whether your co-writer is human or not.