How This Email Gets Made
A human–AI collaboration, every Saturday
I wrote this in week two of the weekly email, on 2nd March 2026. The process has evolved significantly since.
Two things stand out that this version doesn’t properly capture:
- Everything in the email comes from me. Something I’ve read, something I’ve done. There’s no web trawl filling in what I might have missed. It’s a week of my working life. (A separate research artefact, How the AI Story Was Told, reads the press; it is not where this email comes from.)
- I’m much clearer now on how big my role is at every step. I know exactly what I’m doing versus what the language models are doing, and I’ve done some clever things to keep them in their box along the way.
How it worked in week two. The diagram below is the process as it was then. It has changed since: David chooses the material and the argument; AI assists with processing, drafting and production within defined instructions; automated checks support human review; David approves each edition and scheduled systems publish it.
Edition 1 was written largely by hand — from a voice memo, through multiple drafts, with Claude helping on wording and research. Claude Code then studied that first issue and built a reusable framework: tone of voice, structure, template, style guide. That framework now shapes every future edition (from a task to recurring delegated work).
- Voice memos recorded between meetings
- Screenshots of the relevant bit
- Links sent via Telegram
- Discussions sparked by reader replies