AI drafts fast, and it drafts the same way for everyone. I spent hundreds of hours trying to teach it to sound like me before I found something that held. This is that process. It takes about an hour.
I can tell when something was written by AI, and I suspect most of us can by now. It’s the em dashes, mostly, and the sentences built on a contrast, this thing and not that thing, over and over. It’s the same rhythm every time, the same shape of paragraph, the same reach for a tidy line at the end.
The writing isn’t bad. It’s competent. It just isn’t mine, and anyone who has read me for a while would know it. That mattered more to me than I expected it to, because my writing is most of how people meet me.
So I spent hundreds of hours trying to fix it. I fed my books into it, my blog posts, everything I’d written. I edited its drafts line by line and handed the edits back. We set rules together and I asked it to follow its own rules. It didn’t work.
What finally worked was evidence. My sent emails, my quick replies, the note I wrote when I had to tell someone no. Those carry my voice whether I meant them to or not, and that is what this reads. It still isn’t perfect. It’s close enough that I’m confident sending what comes out of it, and I want to share it.
I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to circle back regarding our conversation last week. I would love to leverage the momentum we built and explore next steps at your earliest convenience.
Been thinking about what you said last week. You were right that it is not a systems problem. When do you want to talk about it? I have Thursday open.
Same request. One of them sounds like a person.
Six phases, run by Claude, in one sitting. You answer and paste. It measures, drafts, and tests itself against you.
Fifteen to thirty real pieces. Texts and quick replies matter more than polished work, because voice shows clearest where you were not performing.
Thirty-three of them, one at a time. Rhythm. Formality. Humor. The words you would never use. Most take five seconds.
A standing list of the phrases that give AI away, trimmed down to the ones that are not already yours.
Every rule carries its proof: a real line you wrote, or a real number from your own writing. Nothing goes in that cannot be traced.
Two drafts, one generic and one in your voice, shown to you unlabeled. Then you mark up the one you picked, and those marks become rules.
Save it once. From your next session forward, Claude writes as you.
It’s free. Tell me where to send it and the whole thing lands in your inbox, along with the page where you can copy it straight into Claude.
You’ll need the Claude desktop app and about an hour. Have some of your own writing nearby before you begin, sent emails and quick replies more than polished work.
One email a week after that, with one question worth sitting with. Unsubscribe whenever it stops being that.
Some founders would rather build this on a call than alone at a keyboard, and the voice that comes out of a conversation is usually truer than the one that comes out of a form. If that is you, start here.