What Makes A Writer
Everyone has a signal if they listen for it
🎧 Ona by Romain Garcia at low volume on loop.
I shared my first set of essays with friends and family and the response was immediate. People I hadn’t spoken to in months reached out to say that something in the writing had stayed with them. That they’d read a piece twice. That they’d forwarded it to someone who needed it. It was the kind of feedback that makes you think, maybe this is real.
My fiancée, a physician and a sharper writer than I will ever be, had a different response.
Not about whether the essays worked — she knew they did. About the process. I had been using an AI to help edit and finalize my work. Her question was simple and fair: if she started using AI to help make visual art, would that make her an artist in the way artists have always been artists?
It’s a good question. It might be the question of the decade.
Here is what I told her.
Adobe Photoshop did not make graphic designers less artistic; it made them faster. A background that once took three hours to recolor by hand could suddenly be done with a dropdown menu and a slider. The person using the tool still had to know what to change and why. They still had to possess the eye, the taste, the intention. The tool just compressed the labor.
Before Photoshop, there was the printing press. Before the printing press, there were scribes copying manuscripts by hand in monasteries. If the argument is that the only authentic form of writing is the one with the most manual labor, then the last real writers died in the fifteenth century.
Does using a thesaurus make someone less of a writer? Does asking a friend to edit your work? Does autocorrect fixing your misspellings? Every writer who has ever published a book has handed a manuscript to an editor who restructured sentences, cut paragraphs, and occasionally rewrote passages entirely. We don’t say those authors aren’t writers. We say they had good editors.
I told her that AI is not different in kind from any of this. It is different in degree. The tool is more powerful, the compression more dramatic. In every domain, the gap between thought and product is smaller than it has ever been.
Authenticity can now scale, for anyone who has something worth building. The cost is that it scales everything else too.
When I finished The Hive, I felt something unexpected. Confined. The essay was useful and satisfying but I had spent far too much time on it.
I have years of frameworks in my head and a trading career I have no intention of stepping away from. The math was not working. If every essay took that long, writing would overtake the life I had built to produce the ideas in the first place.
I have spent enough time around startups to recognize that feeling. It’s a bottleneck.
So I sat down with the tool and we spent a week on a different problem. What is the voice I am writing in? If I could define my voice, I could move faster.
What came of this question was revealing.
Short declarative sentences. Periods where most writers reach for the em dash. Polysyndeton, a word I had never heard before, the and, and, and that I apparently use when I am speaking about something I’m passionate about and want the other person to feel the weight of. The rhythm where I describe a scene and then lift off into the meaning underneath it. The reach for metaphor when the argument cuts close to the bone. Things I had been doing my entire life, in conversation, in writing and long messages, in the way I explained ideas to friends. All of it named.
From there, the founder in me saw something. A way to raise the ceiling without losing my voice. What started as a single essay grew into a collection. But it required more focus, dedication, and sacrifice. Not less. Each piece still took weeks. Written and thrown out and written again. But it opened a path toward a movement, without surrendering the life that created the substance.
The frameworks came from that life: the hive, the cost of differing frequencies, the filter, the gap. No machine generated those. No machine could.
The writers I follow have always been people in industry. People with ideas tested by markets and stakes. By the friction between making something real and the scars it left.
That is the voice I trust as a reader, and it is the voice I am as a writer.
Much of the hate on AI comes from the fear of losing something. Creativity. Soul. The artistic journey we take to make something ours.
Most of what the tool makes is slop. You have seen it, and you are not wrong.
You know it the moment you read it. Well-made, fluent, but no one home. Nothing in the writing is lived or risked. It hovers above the subject, never specific enough to be wrong.
The truth is that there is a flood of content from people using AI carelessly — with no soul, creativity, rigor, or thought.
We read it, we download their apps, we watch their content, and we decide the problem is AI.
The actual problem was the person who made the product.
This is typical of every innovation cycle we have gone through. It is easy to blame the tool; underneath the anger is something human. A fear of being replaced, of waking up to find the skill you spent a decade on handed to anyone with a subscription. Fear makes sense.
But the tool is here. It is not leaving, and it is only growing in capability. The good news is hiding in plain sight. It can do almost anything now, even for you.
What is most yours, your spirit, is what it can never reach.
Is writing really about prose? Is building an app really about code?
What I learned that week went beyond my relationship to AI. It made me question what craft is in the first place.
For every century before this one, being a writer required fluency in a craft. Grammar, syntax, structure, rhythm. The decade of practice that turns thought into readable language. Creating an app required fluency in a different craft. Variables, control flow, functions, data structures.
Fluency was a gate.
It kept out people who knew what to build but couldn’t code or afford to try. Instead of admitting people with something to say, the gate admitted people good at saying anything. These are not the same population, though they overlap.
The gate was inherently flawed, but now it has been broken. The tool has arrived.
Fluency is no longer scarce.
Anyone with an internet connection has access to baseline craft that used to take years to acquire.
The sentences can be made to land, the paragraphs made to flow, and the app that once needed a team and a year reaches a working version in a matter of weeks.
What is still rare is what fluency was always standing in for.
Thinking. Lived experience. Taste. The eye for what works.
The framework no one else has, because no one else has lived your life. The insight that comes from sitting in medicine or markets or grief long enough that patterns start naming themselves without your permission.
The one thing the tool cannot give you is the only thing that was ever worth having.
Fluency is the new floor. Mastery has no ceiling.
Some writers spend their lives building a voice so specific, so fused to the way they think, that the prose and the mind become one thing. You can read two sentences and know whose they are. The rhythm is theirs. The silences between the words are theirs. That is not fluency. That is something deeper, and no tool produces it.
I have not written at that altitude. I am nine essays in. The gap is real, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t.
The same depth lives in the people building rockets, in anyone working at the edge of what is physically possible. The resilience that cannot be downloaded. The public failures. Risking all their capital and sleepless years on the next attempt, when the odds said stop. Different mastery. Identical essence. Earned the hard way, and worth honoring.
But this essay was never about the legends.
It is about the far larger number of people who were kept out of the room entirely, because they could not clear the bar of fluency, even though they had something worth giving.
You have something in your head that should be given to the world.
Maybe it’s a framework you’ve said out loud a hundred times and never written down. Maybe it's the app idea you share and everyone responds, someone should build this, but no one has, including you, because you told yourself you don't code. Maybe it’s a cookbook of your grandmother’s recipes or the course only you could teach or the book you have been writing in your head since you were nineteen.
But I’m not a coder. I’m not a designer. I’m not a writer.
These are the flies we hide behind. Limiting beliefs that outlive the resistance that earned them.
For most of history these were real barriers to entry. And they kept honest people quiet, with regret slowly building over a lifetime.
The tool took the barrier down, everywhere, and all at once.
The distance is collapsing. Not just for me. For you.
It won’t be easy. But it is now possible.
The only question left is whether you find the bravery and resilience to march through the gate.
A few weeks after the conversation that started this essay, I noticed my fiancée on the couch, working on a deadline.
She asked me to show her how I had been using the tool. How to teach it her voice by feeding it her own writing to better collaborate.
She took it from there. Last week she finished final edits on a paper that had already been accepted to Academic Medicine. It was excellent. It was hers.
She was never trying to attack me. She was stress testing that the work is mine.
And now the tool is hers.
So, to answer the question everyone has been too polite to ask: yes, I use AI to help edit my work.
I use it the way a musician uses a studio, the way an architect uses software, the way every person reading this used autocorrect on their last text message without once questioning whether the message was still theirs.
The ideas are mine. The life is mine. The cost is mine. The tool is everyone’s.
It’s waiting for you.
If you know someone who needs a push, share this.
Season Finale Next Week
The Big Win on Sunday, June 7th at 6:30pm EST.
Find me on X: @sunil_hebbar