For most of my life, the hard part of writing was the first draft. The blank page, the first sentence, the hour it takes to find out what you actually think. Everything after that was cleanup. That order has flipped. A model will hand you a first draft of almost anything in the time it takes to describe it, and the draft will be fine. Fine is the problem. The work now starts where it used to end: deciding what, out of all that fluent text, deserves to stay.
I did not expect this. I built an editor around AI assuming the drafting would be the exciting part. What I found, using it on my own writing every day, is that nearly all of my time goes to editing: cutting, reordering, pushing back, keeping one sentence in five. Writing with AI is mostly editing, and that changes what a writing tool should be.
Drafting got cheap. Editing did not.
A draft used to be expensive, so you protected it. You revised carefully, because another draft cost a day, and you lived with sentences you did not love because replacing them was work. That constraint is gone. Drafts are nearly free. You can have six versions of a paragraph before your coffee cools.
Reading six versions is not free. Editing is bounded by how fast a person can read with attention, and that speed has not changed. The bottleneck has moved from your fingers to your judgment, and judgment does not scale the way generation does. If anything it gets scarcer, because every cheap draft is one more thing that needs judging.
There is a trap in this. Because a new draft costs nothing, the temptation is to regenerate instead of edit. Not quite right, try again. Still not right, try again. You end up pulling a lever, hoping the next draft is the one, when the draft you had was nearly there and needed three sentences changed. Regenerating feels like progress and mostly is not. Editing feels slow and is where the piece gets made.
What AI first drafts are like
Let me be specific, because enthusiasm about AI drafts tends to be vague. A model's draft is fluent, well organized and even. It contains no bad sentences, and that is its tell. It opens by framing the topic, offers three parallel points, and closes by restating them. It hedges where you would commit. It reaches for the expected word. It knows what a piece on your subject usually says, and it gives you that.
What it does not know is what you think. The draft sits at the center of everything already written on the subject, and the center is rarely the interesting place to stand. Read it as a map of the obvious: here is the version of this piece that anyone could have written. That is genuinely useful. It tells you what to avoid.
The same model, handed something specific, behaves very differently. Give it a rough paragraph of your own and a precise request: tighten this, keep my phrasing, cut the second example. The result is often excellent, and it sounds like you, because it started from you. The quality of what comes back tracks the quality of what you handed over. A blank prompt gets the average. Your draft gets your draft, improved.
Judgment is the skill
Knowing what to keep has always been the editor's skill. Writers have long known that the writing happens in the cutting. What is new is that everyone needs that skill now, every day, because everyone is now the editor of a tireless, fluent, slightly bland collaborator.
In practice it looks like this. Reading with attention instead of skimming for whether it is "fine". Knowing your own position well enough to notice when the draft slides to the safe middle. Recognizing the one sentence that sounds like you and building outward from it. Being willing to delete a competent paragraph because it is not the point. None of this is mysterious. All of it is work, and it is work a model cannot do for you, because the thing being judged is whether the text says what you mean.
Regenerating feels like progress and mostly is not.
What this asks of a tool
If editing is the job, three things follow for how a writing tool should work, and none of them is cosmetic.
First, the edits have to happen where the text is. Copying a paragraph into a chat window, reading the answer, pasting it back over the original: that is a workflow designed for generating, not for editing. It breaks your reading of the page, and it hides what changed. The request should be made from inside the document, about a selection, and the result should land in the same place. That is what editing in context means, and it is the difference between an assistant and a vending machine.
Second, you need to see the change as a change. A rewrite that silently replaces your paragraph is regeneration in better clothes. What you want is a diff: this went, this came, in small units, each one a proposal you can accept or refuse. The unit matters. A sentence or a paragraph you can judge in a glance. "Here is your new document" you cannot judge at all, so you either accept it on faith or throw it away.
Third, your voice is the reference, not the model's. The model's default tone of voice is the average I described above. Yours is the thing you are protecting. A tool should make it easy to hand the model your own writing as the example, so that "like this" means like you, and the assistant's job is to fit your sentences rather than replace them.
This is the shape we gave Strokes. You select a passage, press ⌘K and say what you want changed; the rewrite arrives in place. In Agent mode every edit is listed with what the assistant read and what it changed, and nothing is final until you accept it. Any document can be added to the Assistant's chat as context, so when you say "like this", the example is your own writing. Version history keeps earlier versions of the document and marks the changes when you preview one, so a bold edit costs nothing to try and one click to undo.
How I write now
I draft first, fast and badly, in my own words, because a bad draft of mine contains what I think and a good draft of the model's does not. Then I edit one passage at a time with a specific request, and I read every change before I accept it. When I do ask for a draft from scratch, I treat it as reading rather than text: it shows me the obvious version of the piece, and I write away from it.
Regenerating is for when the structure is wrong. Editing is for everything else. The phrase "keep my phrasing" does more for the result than any amount of extra generated text. And the last pass is always mine, read aloud, with nothing from the model in the room.
Bring a draft of your own. That is where the editing starts.