I’ve been exploring how AI can help me with drafting internal documents, like project plans.
I tried Gemini in Google Docs and was pretty unhappy with the results. It was clunky to use, difficult to iterate, and there wasn’t a simple way to give it context from elsewhere.
So now I’m doing everything in my IDE with various agents.
I save supporting documents from Google Docs as markdown files. I group them in a directory, and open the directory in my IDE. And then I have a conversation with the agent about what I need. I pose theories and ask it if my supporting docs + academic papers on the web contain data that supports those theories. Or I ask it to analyze data across the different sources. Or I ask it to create queries so I can pull data from various metrics sources I have access to.
This allows me to quickly validate theories (or not!) and easily draft content with supporting data. Then I can refine as needed depending on what kind of doc I’m writing. When I’m done, I paste the markdown from my IDE into a Google Doc using the “Paste as markdown” feature to preserve formatting.
This gives me the flexibility to use my preferred agents and data sources to find the right messages, and then I can wordsmith the result. It has saved me a lot of hours versus manually pouring over hundreds of pages of source material/digging around in metrics myself. I still have to validate the output, because AI, but I think this is my new process for drafting internal docs going forward.