Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash
Last week I mentioned that I knocked off about four months of work in a weekend using Claude Code . I migrated 32,000 images, audited a Ghost website, updated plugins across 60+ sites, cleaned up AWS storage buckets, migrated courses, and fixed bugs on StorytellerOS while I was eating lunch. The robot handled the thing AND told the customer it handled the thing and then emailed me that it had handled the thing. Genius.
That kind of time savings has been incredible for my task list. It’s also left me thinking deeply about the line between knowledge work and creative work—and where AI belongs on either side of that line. I don’t have all the answers. But here’s what sparked my thinking this week.
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Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company behind Claude), laid out his predictions in a January 2026 essay called The Adolescence of Technology . He describes what he calls “powerful AI”—essentially a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”—that’s smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields, can work autonomously for days or weeks at a time, and could be running in millions of instances within 1–2 years. He’s also publicly predicted that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in 1–5 years. I buy most of that—not because AI is magical, but because a lot of knowledge work is painfully predictable.
Knowledge Work vs. Creative Work Knowledge work gets graded on correctness. You take inputs, apply rules, and produce a deliverable that can be checked against a standard. Did you follow the process? Is the output accurate? Congrats, here’s your paycheck. It’s work that lives inside a flowchart, and agents love flowcharts. They don’t get bored, they don’t get distracted, and they don’t decide to alphabetize the spice rack halfway through a quarterly report. (We’ve all been there. The spice rack was calling to you. The AI doesn’t hear the spice rack.)
Creative work gets graded on whether a stranger feels something, and there’s no checklist for that. You can hit every craft beat correctly and still produce something that lands with a thud, because resonance isn’t a process you can document. I’ve read plenty of books that did everything “right” and I couldn’t tell you a single character’s name a week later.
AI is extremely good at correctness. Left to its own devices, it’s mediocre at resonance—and that gap is where the real work lives. Some writers are closing that gap brilliantly, using AI as a collaboration partner while infusing every page with their own voice, taste, and weird creative instincts. But if you talk to those writers for five minutes, you’ll hear the same thing: it’s hard . It requires knowing your voice so well that you can spot when AI has smoothed it away. It requires taste sharp enough to reject perfectly competent prose because competent isn’t the same as alive. The writers doing this well aren’t saving effort—they’re redirecting it from drafting into curation, revision, and creative direction, which are skills that take real development.
Without that human layer, AI can write a technically solid book right now. It can do structure. It can do tropes. It can do competent prose that offends no one. It can also crank out 90,000 words that feel like wallpaper. Pretty wallpaper, sure. Still wallpaper.
The difference between AI-assisted books that work and AI-assisted books that don’t isn’t the AI. It’s how much of you ended up on the page. Because readers don’t stick around for wallpaper. They stick around for voice.
Voice is not “good writing.” Voice is taste. It’s what you notice and what you ignore. It’s what you’re willing to say out loud. It’s how your brain moves across the page. It’s the difference between “this is fine” and “I have to text my friend about this character immediately.” AI doesn’t have that. You do. The collaboration works when you bring enough of yours to the table that a reader would never know (or care) how the words got there.
Competent Prose Has the Same Problem as Tribute Bands AI can mimic taste the way a cover band can mimic Depeche Mode. There’s a tribute band called Depeche Tribute that’s genuinely good—they’ve got the sound down, they play the songs right, and I enjoy listening to them. But when I hear them, I don’t feel anything beyond “hey, this is fun.”
When I hear the actual Depeche Mode, it’s a random Friday night and I’m drinking Boone’s Farm Tickle Pink at the Flats in Lake Arrowhead, California with 50 of my best friends, all of us keeping one eye on the keg that someone’s brother that goes to USC got us, and one eye out for cops ready to bust us for underage drinking. I’m not just hearing the music—I’m back in 1985, feeling every dumb, wonderful thing I felt that Sophomore year.
The cover band can’t give me that. They’re playing the notes. They’re not carrying the meaning.
AI-generated fiction—left entirely on its own—has the same problem. It can produce competent prose that hits the right beats and follows the right structures. You might enjoy reading it. But there’s no lived experience underneath it, no accumulation of taste and memory and opinion that makes one author’s voice different from another’s. It’s the notes without the meaning.
I know this newsletter will lose some subscribers because writing with AI is divisive, and some will read this as encouragement. It’s not.
I don’t teach writing with AI. That’s not my lane and I’m not pretending it is. My lane is information, education, marketing automation, and business process optimization, with a sprinkle of with a sprinkle of how to scale without sacrificing sleep, sanity, or the things that made you start writing in the first place.
Educators don’t get to skip the uncomfortable parts just because they’re uncomfortable. I’m not here to tell you what to do with AI and your creative work. I’m here to tell you what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is worth talking about honestly.
What I’m seeing is this: some writers are using AI as a collaboration partner and producing work that resonates. They’re bringing their own Boone’s Farm moments to the process—their memories, their opinions, their willingness to cut a perfectly good sentence because it doesn’t sound like them—and using AI to get to a draft faster so they can do the real work of making it theirs. That’s a legitimate creative process. It’s also genuinely difficult, because it means knowing your voice well enough to hear when it’s missing.
So no, I’m not losing sleep over AI replacing novelists. I’m losing sleep over authors burning their best creative energy on admin that machines are about to bulldoze. I’m losing sleep over the stuff that’s actually fixable.
Use Agents for the Business Work. Let Them Earn Their Keep. Give AI the stuff you already resent doing: inbox sorting and triage, drafting and scheduling your newsletter, writing and reformatting book descriptions for twelve different retailers, updating backmatter links across your entire catalog every time you release a new book, generating keywords and categories for a launch, building a series page on your website, pulling your sales data into a spreadsheet that actually makes sense, turning one blog post into a thread, a carousel, a short-form video script, and a pin. Formatting and metadata and distribution. The stuff that keeps you at your desk at 11pm even though the actual book is done.
If an assistant could do it, an agent will do it. Probably faster. Definitely without asking you where the Google Drive folder is.
Then keep the story decisions with the human who has a point of view. Keep the parts that make readers care: what the book is actually about under the plot, what your characters want and what you refuse to give them, what you find funny or sharp or tender or unforgivable, the emotional experience you’re building on purpose, the choices that make your work feel like you and not like “a book in this genre.”
A lot of books are going to get replaced by AI-generated content, because they’re text, not storytelling. AI Agents will eat that market like it’s free snacks. But this isn’t new. Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital, told me his company was fighting off literally thousands of smoothie recipe books a decade ago —people chasing quick money with low-quality content designed to ride whatever trend was hot. Before that it was keto books. Before that it was crypto guides. The opportunists have always been here. AI just made their playbook faster and cheaper.
The scale tells you everything. Draft2Digital now rejects between 40 and 75 percent of all book submissions, and it’s almost entirely AI-generated nonfiction. Thousands arrive every single day. The fiction side is a different story: Austin says authors who’ve tried to write full novels with AI “tend not to do very well in the market. That humanity seems to be missing. It’s kind of one of those things you can’t directly define, but it doesn’t appear that readers are connecting with that content.”
That tracks with everything we’ve been talking about. The notes without the meaning. The cover band without the Friday night memory. Readers notice, even when they can’t articulate exactly what’s off—and Austin predicts they’ll feel betrayed when they find out a book sold as human-authored wasn’t.
Authors who write with opinion, specificity, and a little nerve are going to be fine. Not because AI can’t write. Because AI can’t be you.
So yeah, let the AI agents have the checklists. Writers still get to be weird. And thank all the deities, because the world does not need one more perfectly acceptable book.
What I’m Focused on in 2026 Last weekend I had a website update to handle—SEO cleanup and some structural changes so AI tools could actually find and surface the content correctly (LLM optimization is a whole thing now, and I’ll talk about that next week). My muscle memory said open Make.com. Instead, I opened Claude Code to see if it could handle it.
Spoiler: It did. And then some. Read how:
My own workflow had shifted underneath me without me making some big strategic decision about it. I’ve been reassessing my automations all year, and I keep reaching for agentic AI first—website updates, SEO optimization, content structuring—and reaching for my traditional automation tools second. Make.com, n8n, and Zapier aren’t going anywhere (they’re still the backbone for repeatable, scheduled workflows), but I’m handing the one-shot, messy, or judgment-heavy stuff to agents now.
I’ve also been leaning into two content directions this year outside this newsletter to get some more perspective and options that shape it, and also provide better examples of technical stuff:
CEO interviews — We launched a new series on YouTube/@indieauthormagazine where I sit down with the people running the companies authors depend on. Less “how to use the tool,” more “what’s the vision and why should authors care.” (The Kris Austin interview above came from this series.)
Technical walkthroughs — My channel at YouTube/@chellehoniker is where I break down the actual builds, with deeper automation tutorials living on hub.authorautomations.com .
And one more thing: Indie Author Magazine is now on Substack. If you want industry news, craft deep-dives, and interviews with authors who are doing interesting things, subscribe at indieauthormagazine.substack.com . It’s a different newsletter than this one—less automation nerdery, more publishing strategy and author business. If you’re already subscribed here, you might want both.
What to Do This Week (If You’re Curious About What AI Can Actually Do) Build an “admin vacuum” for your inbox. Create one rule or filter that catches newsletters, receipts, and platform notifications and sends them to a folder you check once a day. Your brain is not a dumpster. Stop living like it is. (I’ve got a full walkthrough on inbox triage at hub.authorautomations.com —look for the email management workflows.)
Pick one thing from the suck list and hand it to AI this week. Not all of them. One. Maybe it’s reformatting your book description for a new retailer. Maybe it’s pulling your January sales data into a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s updating the website you’ve been ignoring since your last release. Pick the task that’s been sitting on your to-do list making you feel guilty, and let an AI tool take the first pass. You’ll edit the output—that’s fine. You’re not starting from zero anymore.
Create a repurposing pipeline for one piece of content. One newsletter becomes a short post, a longer post, a carousel, and a pin. You edit for voice, but you stop writing five separate things from scratch every week. (The Hub has a content repurposing workflow that does exactly this—connect it to your publishing platform and let it run.)
None of this requires you to have an opinion about AI and writing. This is just getting the business busywork off your plate so you have more time for the work you actually care about—whatever that looks like for you.
If you want help, hit reply and tell me what you’re drowning in right now: inbox, content, research, launches, or customer support. I’ll point you at the simplest automation that gets your time back without turning you into a part-time systems engineer.
—Chelle
Upcoming Free Webinars All webinars are free and replays are available if you can’t make it live. See the full schedule and register here.
February 10 @ 10am CST — What’s All the Fuss About Claude Code Chelle Honiker (That’s me. I’ll be showing what I’ve been ranting about in this newsletter.)
February 11 @ 11am CST — It’s Not the Price—It’s the Perception: Make Higher Prices a No-Brainer Celeste Barclay
February 18 @ 11am CST — Edit Smarter, Not Harder: How AI Can Reveal What Your Story Is Really Doing Alessandra Torre & JD Lasica
March 4 @ 11am CST — Design a Writing Career That Fits Marla Albertie
March 11 @ 11am CDT — Are You Blocking Your Success? Aryn Van Dyke
April 8 @ 11am CDT — Print Matters: Learn How to Leverage Print to Grow Sales Dave Sheets
April 15 @ 11am CDT — Email Marketing That Turns Readers into Fans (and Buyers) Dale Roberts
Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.