A Self-Evident Essay Arguing for the Use of AI

This little project is meant to argue for the use of AI, and to demonstrate the use of AI in the process of forming the argument itself. It is best to inspect the commit differences with the --word-diff flag.

Essay: The Sins of AI Writing Prompts: Claude Code Prompt

Draft

The draft was written quickly, after thinking about the issue for one evening.

Prepare the environment

After the draft, I needed a plugin for the Vim editor to hook into Claude Code. None existed off-the-shelf, so I talked to Claude and settled on using tpope/vim-dispatch with some Claude-generated Vim functions.

Grammar Fix

It was done paragraph by paragraph. The process was slow because I wouldn't let go of the opportunity to learn from fixing those grammar errors.

When the first half of the essay was done, I started to rewrite the second half, realizing it was poorly constructed.

Facilitate Diff

I set out to configure the tool prettier with a plugin to enable a one-sentence-per-line format, so that the differences between commits could be easily inspected.

Continue Grammar Fix

I fixed grammar errors in the second half of the essay.

Then, I felt the example in the last section might not be well received. Despite being a genuine personal example, it could spark an unnecessary, off-topic argument about ad promotion. I flagged it to rewrite later.

Structure Improvement

Claude raised 12 structure issues in one run. Of these, 9 were accepted as suggested, 2 were accepted with edits, and 1 piece of advice was followed.

It also flagged a lack of parallelism in the section headings. As a result, two subtitles were updated.

Replace the example

I replaced it with a general example, as flagged previously.

Copyediting

AI made it very easy.