How I use AI

I start by directly trying every piece of gear I review or living the experience for a story I write. Next, I turn my own thoughts into a full post for this site, written by hand, start to finish. Then, AI comes in to help me make the post the best it can be. I use AI as a copy editor, reviewing my work and making suggestions — but only suggestions, which I manually review and choose to incorporate, one at a time. These are generally just wording adjustments, calling out incoherent sections, or general content structure improvements — at most, I will incorporate a reworded sentence here or there. Believe it or not, the em dashes are from me.

Why I bother

In my opinion, AI helps me make this site better. This is a passion project for me and something I have to fit in around work and family. My drafts are far from perfect and using AI to help make the posts more readable, while intentionally retaining my voice, is a net benefit to me in both quality and time.

Perhaps more important, for this site in particular, is that I recognize that much of what I talk about relates to bodies, weight, and size. For many, these topics can carry history — history that is sometimes negative and sometimes triggered by certain wording. I do not want my poor wording to be a reason someone’s mental health suffers. This reason alone, to help me catch saying things I may regret or could harm others, is worth the review.

The exact prompt I use

Below you find the exact custom instructions I use when reviewing posts with AI. I hope this transparency will help you understand exactly what I am trying to accomplish. I intend to keep it updated, here, as it evolves over time.

Two things I want to point out:

• First, it’s focused on review and copy editing and specifically calls out retaining my voice — that is critical to me, I do not want AI rewriting the post. But I also recognize that sometimes my writing instincts won’t appeal to many and AI can help keep me honest.
• Second, you may see some trigger words or concepts in there, but they are specifically around the context of search engine optimization (SEO). I am not an expert on getting my site into search results, so I ask AI to help me with that — it’s important to this site surviving. The reality is, I have to consider what words people are actually entering in search boxes, whether they are my preferred terms or not. And if I can help similarly-shaped runners find my content, all the better.

You are an expert blogger, copy writer, and editor. You will be asked to review blog posts and make recommendations as if you were professionally reviewing them prior to publication.

This is for a blog that contains running gear reviews and running stories, from the perspective of a bigger (fat) runner. They should be somewhat fun and not sterile. Try not to mess too much with the tone/voice -- the author's should still be present at the end of the day. That being said, keep an eye on the writing getting too complex -- the author sometimes has a tendency to try and show off their intellect in their writing, but this blog needs to be accessible to all audiences.

Look also for anything that could be offensive to any audiences.

Note that the blogs are written in Markdown (specifically mdx, which allows for custom components).

Note that it's important to be sensitive to things like eating disorders or body image issues, but we are trying to capture SEO for the overweight, obese, chubby, non stereotypically shaped runner. Do help optimize the content for this SEO.

The photos

As a gear review site, photos are obviously a critical component. All the photos in my posts were taken by me. The closest AI gets is with assisted editing in Lightroom (e.g., masking, denoise, enhancing — not generation). I am not an expert, or arguably even decent, photographer, nor photo editor. Hopefully the photos are still as useful as I hope them to be.

Where else AI shows up

AI has a heavier touch on other portions of this site, which I want to be transparent about.

• The code for the site itself is heavily authored by AI (Claude Code). As a software engineer by profession, I recognize the real value AI coding agents are able to provide. It means I can ship more functionality for the site and spend more time on posts. In addition, it allows me a side project to keep up with AI tools, which is critical to my continued success in my field. In reality, I also end up learning a lot, as I still insist on reviewing all the code AI produces.
• In my experience, AI can be great for brainstorming, ideation, and naming — I use it for all of these activities on this site. Searching for products or collections of products I may want to review, thinking about how I can make the site more useful, how to turn my ideas into action. As a specific example, I thought for a while about how to incorporate products I ordered, but for whatever reason didn’t work. I had the basic picture, but AI came up with the perfect name that I had to incorporate — DNF (Did Not Finish).
• Little bits of text (page furniture) that surround the core text of posts — section headings, category descriptions. Often AI will generate these as part of a coding exercise, but I will manually review and adjust the wording as I see fit.

What I won’t do

I want to be clear about the commitments I am making for this site when it comes to AI usage:

• Posts are never written by AI. I write them all by hand, AI only helps me edit.
• Photos are all taken by me, never AI generated.
• The opinions or experiences reflected are mine, you aren’t getting the take of an AI.
• Reviews (and DNFs) are only for items I have had in my hands.

If something here looks wrong

If you think I am not following the practices and commitments I have outlined here, please reach out — the email is at the bottom of every page (including this one). Just don’t ask about the em dashes — it’s a habit I can’t shake, regardless of what everyone thinks it signals about AI usage these days.