AI can help you write without writing for you
How I use Gemini for meeting notes and message outlines, then do the writing and editing myself.
Published 2026-06-15
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How I use Gemini for meeting notes and message outlines, then do the writing and editing myself.
I use AI for note-taking all the time. I'll open Gemini and type or talk my notes into a chat. Even in a meeting, I'll type notes as we go and ask if there are questions I should be asking or areas I should be paying more attention to. It brings up things I would otherwise have forgotten, and I find those meetings much more productive because of it.
But I don't then ask Gemini to write a Slack message for me to copy and send. I ask for an outline of what I should bring up. Usually a couple of bullet points, with notes under each about what I should talk about. Something like this:
Based on my notes, give me a couple of bullet points for a message to the team. Under each, add notes on what I should cover. Leave the actual message for me to write.
Then I fill in the blanks and edit. By the time I'm done, I've worked through every sentence myself. Sometimes I keep a phrase AI suggested because I've read it and like it better than what I would have written. Most of the time, I'm rewriting quite a lot.
I generally find it easier to edit something AI creates than to write something from scratch and ask AI to edit it. But that can become a crutch. It's easy to let AI write the whole thing, ask it to edit itself, and press send. Eventually, the messages stop sounding like you.
Have AI make the block of marble. Then carve it down until it sounds exactly how you want to sound. An outline gives me enough to work with without making all the decisions about the finished piece.
I keep editing after something is published, too. I'll come back days, weeks, or months later and tweak a few words. My writing style changes, and rereading my own work helps me figure out what I like and what I'd say differently now. That's one reason these blog posts live in .mdx files. I can open them in a local Markdown editor and keep making small changes whenever I want.