A recurring pattern in the history of warfare: technology arrives and changes the game. The crossbow. Plate armour. The musket. Each time, there’s a period where the new approach is considered dishonorable - a violation of chivalric code, an affront to martial culture.

Regiments that built their identity around a particular way of fighting either adapt or maintain their traditions at great cost. The cost being: they lose. The force with no answer to the new technology gets run down. Honour is expensive when the other side isn’t playing by the same rules.

Eventually the rules shift. There are still armoured regiments in the British Army known as cavalry, but there are no horses. The Parachute Regiment still conducts static-line jumps as part of training and regimental routine, but it’s not something any of them do in combat these days.

The rituals persist. The practical reality moves on.

Right now

Here’s how I’m writing this post.

I’m walking the dogs and pushing my eighteen-month-old daughter in the pram while she sleeps. I have a Bluetooth headset on - a Yealink BH71 that picks up voice well against background noise. My Android phone is in my pocket with the native recorder app running.

When I’m done, I’ll open the recorder app, tap share, and Tailscale will appear in the list. One tap sends the file to my laptop. I’ll switch to Termux, which already has a tmux session connected via Tailscale, and tell Claude Code: “There’s an audio file. Transcribe it and write the post.”

The model will transcribe the audio, write it up, commit it, push to GitHub, where a pipeline - also set up entirely by the model - publishes it to the blog.

I’m dictating ideas, not text. The AI is absolutely part of the process - it turns my rambling, my half-formed thoughts, my mid-sentence course corrections into written form. I wrote no code and no copy. And yet it’s all mine.

I review the posts in a web browser on my phone - easier to read than diffs in Termux. Testing in production. If I spot something I’d change, I tell the model; it makes the edit and publishes in under twenty seconds. The iteration loop is tighter than anything I’ve experienced before.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It’s more faithful to my ideas than if I sat down and typed. I’m prone to distraction when writing. Less so when talking. The thoughts come out closer to what I actually mean.

The copywriter

A friend of mine works as a copywriter. He told me something that’s apparently an open secret in the industry: when you see an article in a newspaper or business magazine written by a CEO, it is almost never written by that person.

What happens is this. The CEO approves something in note form - maybe a few bullet points, maybe a recorded conversation. It gets sent to a copywriting shop. Someone like my friend writes a draft. It bounces back and forth between agencies until everyone’s happy. Then it gets published with the CEO’s name on it.

Is that cheating?

I suppose in some sense it is, if you’re putting a name on something you didn’t write. Except it’s done everywhere, has been for decades, to the point where getting shrill about it would feel naive.

We’re already in the middle of an Overton window shift on this. We semi-accept ghostwriting even if we don’t fully acknowledge the implications. The rules changed; we just didn’t update the discourse.

The filter

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Samaritans service filters for people comfortable calling strangers on the phone. If you’re not that person, you’re less likely to reach out - even if you need help.

Writing has a similar filter. You need time, inclination, comfort with the medium. You need to be able to turn messy thoughts into coherent prose. The people who write are the people who clear those hurdles. Everyone else stays quiet.

This changes that. Not just dictation - dictation alone would still require you to speak in publishable sentences. What changes things is rough, messy speech being transformed by AI into the post those thoughts imply. Claude Code running Opus 4.5, in my case - though it’ll probably be something else in a month. The friction isn’t just reduced; a whole stage of the process is handled by something else.

More thoughts make it out into the world. Including ones from people who could never have written them down.

The question

I could write this myself. I can type, and I have in the past. But I’m producing more now - orders of magnitude more - than I ever did when writing was the bottleneck.

Is it cheating?

The same question applies to software, and to plenty of other work besides. Code I would have written by hand now gets generated from descriptions. Designs I would have sketched get roughed out by models. The person is still there - directing, evaluating, iterating - but the mechanical production has shifted.

We’re mid-shift on this too. Semi-accepting, not fully acknowledged. The opportunity cost of refusing to engage is already real, even if the discourse hasn’t caught up.

I think the rules are shifting. They usually do.