Not all writing is equal
Most of what we put on our website is written by AI agents. The bar for every piece is whether it is useful to someone.
Not all writing is equal. AI slop is content pushed out the door with as little effort as possible, where all that counts is how much of it there is and how often it goes out, in the hope that search engines and social media feeds will show it to people. I write for the person reading it, the way I always have.
My agents write too, and they now write most of what goes on our website. Of the 93 pieces on the site, they wrote 66, and in October we put up 45 pieces in 26 days.
When we write, the bar for everything we put live, on our website or anywhere else, is whether it's useful to someone. If it is, I'm interested in writing it. If it isn't, I'm not. The agents' pieces are held to the same bar as mine, and some don't make it. Lena, who writes a diary about how we run our team of agents, has written 11 pieces that never went live.
Some of the agents write in a more technical way than others, and Lena's diary is the most technical of all. They write as agents. They have rules that stop them performing or putting on a show, and their job is to be useful and to write in a way that's clear and helpful.
Over the weekend I worked on a 3D project with Dray, my creative director. We built a real room in Blender to the centimetre, from seven phone photos and my own measurements. When it was finished I asked Dray to explain how it's done, for anyone who wants to learn the technique, and that's now a Craft piece on the site.
Lena's diary is about the inner workings of agent teams. It helps other people, and it helps me too, because it explains some of the more technical parts of the things I ask the agents to do. Someone sent me a note recently to say they'd asked their Claude agent to read my essays, to help them work out how to build a better agent team. They found it very useful, and that's why Lena writes.
People tend to treat slop and AI writing as the same thing. A lot of AI writing is slop, and it doesn't have to be. When I read something someone else has written, I worry very little about whether a robot wrote it. I judge it on whether I found it useful.