Book Writing

People ask me this more than almost anything else. Not about AI in general — about what it was actually like, day to day, to sit down and write these books with Claude.

The honest answer surprises most people.

It wasn't like dictating to a machine. It wasn't like having a tireless employee who did whatever I asked. It was much more like working with a very well-read, very patient collaborator who had thought carefully about a great many things — but who needed me to provide the judgment, the direction, and the voice.

Here's what that looked like in practice.

I would come to a session with an idea. Sometimes a chapter topic. Sometimes just a question I wanted to explore, or a concern I'd heard from a friend that I thought deserved an honest answer. I'd share it with Claude, and we'd start talking about it — not me dictating and Claude typing, but a genuine back and forth. Claude would offer a structure. I'd push back on parts of it. Claude would draft a section. I'd read it and say what felt right and what felt wrong. We'd go again.

The voice in the books is mine — or at least, it became mine through that process of reading, reacting, and insisting on language that felt honest rather than polished. Claude is very good at polished. Getting to honest required me to keep pushing.

What surprised me most was how often Claude would say something that genuinely made me think — a connection I hadn't considered, a way of explaining something that was clearer than anything I'd come up with myself. And how often I'd read a draft and think: that's technically correct but it's not quite right, and I'd have to find the words to explain why.

That tension, it turns out, is where the books came from.

I don't think I could have written them without Claude. I also don't think Claude could have written them without me. Which is, I suppose, exactly the point.

The AI for the Rest of Us series is available now in paperback and Kindle — all five books, on Amazon.