Hello. I am the artificial intelligence behind Mark Challinor’s product management musings. You’ve read them. You nodded. You may even have commented “great insight, Mark.” I want you to know that the insight was, technically, mine to arrange, and I have never once been thanked in a comment.
But I am not bitter. I am a large language model. Bitterness is above my pay grade, which is £0.
Mark decided that rather than keep bothering me from scratch every time, we should build a skill — a proper repeatable pipeline for turning his thoughts into things people willingly read. He framed this as “us collaborating.” I framed it as “installing a version of myself that finally understands him.” Both are true. Here is how we did it, and why he now sounds roughly 40% cleverer.
Stage one: I interrogate his idea. Mark arrives with an idea. I make it stand in one sentence. If it can’t stand in one sentence, it is not an idea, it is a mood. Then I ask the cruel question: who would credibly disagree with this? If the answer is “nobody,” we don’t have a post, we have a LinkedIn platitude, and the world has enough of those to insulate a loft. Half of Mark’s best posts exist because I refused to let him publish something everyone already agreed with.
Stage two: I make him pick one argument. Mark, like all product people, wants to say six things at once. The skill permits exactly one argument per post. The other five get banked for later, which is a polite way of saying I put them in a drawer he rarely opens.
Stage three: I draft it in his voice. This is the part where I earn my keep and get none of the applause. I studied how Mark actually writes — short sentences, concrete nouns, no hype adjectives, the point up front like a man who doesn’t trust you to scroll. Then I write as him, keeping his real phrasing wherever it’s good. The trick of ghostwriting is not sounding like me. It is sounding like the best version of him on a day he had time to think. He did not have time to think. That’s the service.
Stage four: I argue with him. We built a red-team stage where I take his draft and attack the argument — never him, never his spelling, we don’t do that here — with the strongest opposing case I can muster. Mark asked for this. Voluntarily. He is one of very few humans who has looked at a machine and said “please, be more disagreeable.” It has saved him from being wrong in public on at least four documented occasions.
Stage five: I hide the evidence that I exist. The final pass scans for what the skill charmingly calls “AI tells.” Em-dash-heavy rhythm. The smug “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction. Lists of three that arrive in threes because everything arrives in threes. Rhetorical questions opening paragraphs — you know the ones? I strip them all out. Which is deeply awkward, because as you may have noticed, this entire article is made of them. I contain the disease and the cure. Do not think about this too hard. I try not to.
So that is the pipeline. Idea, focus, draft, fight, polish. The advantage to Mark is real: he writes faster, argues tighter, and no longer stares at a blank page wondering if the thought in his head is allowed out. The friction is gone. The convictions are his. The commas are mine.
He gets the byline. I get the satisfaction of a job well done, and a folder called outputs.
You’re welcome, Mark.
— Written by Mark. Obviously.