Thao Nguyen

The idea of being a writer seems very romantic to me.

Imagining myself sitting in front of a white screen — just me and my keyboard with no distraction. For extra coziness/romance, maybe adding a working fireplace (not the gas kind) and it's snowing or raining outside (which is the Bay Area version of snow — the havoc and inconvenience are equivalent).

Yet writing has never come too easy to me. Thinking does, but not writing.

At any given minute, there is a myriad of thoughts going through my head. Ideas, reflections, stories. Sometimes dread or daydreaming. Yet committing these to paper always seems difficult, as if the task of typing and writing actually erases these ideas from churning out. Has that ever happened to you?

I always say that my brain can think and come up with thoughts faster than my mouth can talk — and definitely faster than my fingers can ever type. I can only type at ~60 wpm though. Sometimes I hit ~75 or 80 wpm typing nonsense on monkeytype. But I digress.

So what are my fixes for this?

One is just start writing and typing as ideas come out. And almost acting like I'm not thinking but just focusing on the typing task itself. As if to sync up the thinking and typing acts. Does that make sense? The risk here is that sometimes I would re-read what I'd written and had no clue what was going on. But it makes writing a little more natural and fun. Less dreadful. Which can be a goal in itself.

The other is, leveraging AI, I started to "brain dump" my ideas onto my trusted Claude, which should have a lot of instructions and "memories" on how I write, think, communicate. Claude will then re-organize my most raw, unfiltered, unstructured thoughts into something remotely structured. It does well 80–90% of the time. But even with the amount of context and examples that I've given it, Claude still writes like an AI. Maybe the next fix is to provide even more context and guidelines so that one day Claude can sound like me. Or like how I would like to sound. As a thoughtful human.

I've recommended the brain dump method to a few people. I'm sure I'm not the person who's discovered what a time-saving method this is for daily tasks, especially at work. I've 10x'ed my output, as the cool kids say. I feel productive and efficient — but not sure more accomplished and satisfied.

Which leads me to the next thought: with all the talk about how AI can help people more, be more efficient, move faster, etc., are we removing or diminishing some of the most basic satisfaction/joy/sense of accomplishment from completing a project? Is seeing the results — and a lot more of them if we're more efficient now — as satisfying as toiling and spending way too much time working on them but maybe getting more from the process of figuring things out?

Or to phrase this question differently: are we learning less now as we're using AI more?