Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-11-03. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
I’ve been getting help writing these articles-you might have noticed something shifted. For transparency, I want to talk about something that’s changed in how I write here, and why, as I get closer to 300 posts on Substack. I phone a friend for help.
For about the last 10 posts, I haven’t been typing them from scratch. I’ve been talking them. I record a voice note, an AI cleans it up and organizes it, and I edit what comes back. Sometimes the edits are severe. Sometimes, like this one, I try to maintain as much of what I said on the phone so you can make sense of it, too.
I still hand write posts. But I ran into a methodology problem.
The bottleneck
When you post a different project every day, or the next step of one, the posts don’t come out the same size. Some days I’d have a paragraph. Other days I’d have a longer essay. I wasn’t very consistent.
And I’ve come to see these posts as more than posts. Every one of them ends up as fuel for some future project. I’ve noticed that so far: a Substack post becomes jet fuel for whatever I build next.
So I started thinking about how to write faster while also flying around the country for my day job.
Writing by hand needs the right place and the right time of day. You can’t write a long post while walking the dog. You can’t write one while watching the Chiefs play the Chargers. And you can’t write one stuck in traffic at 10 mph.
As what I could build with AI kept growing, a bottleneck showed up, and the bottleneck was me.
I’d already learned that I can’t hand all of the writing over to AI. When it writes the words from scratch, I can’t get behind them.
Writing by hand is great. It forces me to find new ways to say things. It’s also slow, and with my schedule, it isn’t really a workable answer either.
Which left me scratching my head.
A third option
AI writing every word and me writing every word sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. Instead of being so black and white about it, I wanted a third option. What was the form I hadn’t tried yet?
The idea hit me during a voice chat with ChatGPT. I’ve found the better way to do those lately is to use my phone’s microphone to turn my speech into text, send that as a message in the ChatGPT app, and then have it read the answer aloud. The quality of the answers is so much better.
Then it occurred to me. Wait a minute. What if I just did voice notes to an AI?
It already knows how I write. It has over 100 examples of posts I wrote by hand. Now it would also have a big block of my own spoken words to build the article from.
So about 10 posts ago, I started doing it.
Does it still count?
It’s certainly far more efficient. It still reads well. I’d almost say it reads better.
The way I write and the way I talk turn out to be very different. I don’t know if that’s shorthand, or some disconnect in my brain that only shows up in certain situations, but it’s fascinating to me how far apart my spoken words are from what I write by hand.
So, as an exercise: if I record a voice note like this one and it gets turned into a longer article, is that an AI-written piece? Or an AI-assisted one? And does something get lost when the AI cleans it up, organizes it, and keeps it in my voice?
What I’ve found is that the posts made this way still read well, because I can get behind the words. They’re words I actually said out loud. The AI turns them into something you can read: punctuation, commas, and the speech-to-text typos fixed.
And nobody has to sit through 15 minutes of me explaining the situation while the dog barks, traffic honks, or a timer goes off in the kitchen.
It lets me put out a lot more than I could before, and for now, it seems to solve the dilemma.
That doesn’t mean it won’t change again. Maybe once I get past 300 posts there’ll be a day where I need to do more. We’ll see.
For now, I’m talking. You’re reading. That seems like a fair trade.
Connected work
- Writing practice: Read the writing guide.
- On Letting AI Do the Writing: Read the earlier essay on writing with AI.
- I Keep Forgetting to Write the Sentence in My Head: Read the earlier essay on getting words onto the page.