AI rewards expertise (at least for now). Expertise lets you judge AI output quality and find the shape of the jagged frontier quickly. It also gives you more options for how to try to improve quality by knowing what changes to ask for. Non-experts are often stuck with defaults.

AI adoption is spreading far beyond tech: 80.6% of US technology and media businesses now have paid AI subscriptions, the highest percentage on record. Finance and insurance companies follow at 73.1%, up from ~60.0% in December 2025. Meanwhile, 60.4% of US manufacturing firms are paying for AI subscriptions, their highest proportion on record and the 3rd-highest among major sectors. This percentage has nearly doubled since the start of 2025. Over the same period, the proportion of retail companies paying for AI subscriptions has risen +20 percentage points, to a record 49%. Non-tech firms are now quickly adopting AI.

AI writing can sound robotic. But it doesn’t have to. Enter: Compound Writing. Most people use AI for writing like a vending machine: one prompt in, finished piece out. Then they're disappointed when it doesn't sound like them. @kplikethebird uses AI to write every day, but she doesn’t let it draft a whole piece for her in one shot. Before she drafts, the model interviews her with 15-30 questions to draw out her thinking. Then it outlines, drafts, and reviews with her, one section at a time. When a session teaches her something worth keeping, she saves it to her voice and style files. The next piece gets a head start. She packaged the whole process as a free open-source plugin for Claude Code and Codex, with reviewer personas like /hitchcock (does the reader lean in?) and /sorkin (does it move?). Compound Writing, the ultimate guide: