Early September, Belfast airport, killing time in WHSmith. I wandered past the book chart and there at number 8 was a book by Donald Trump.

My first thought was not charitable. How is he writing books? (Yes, I know he didn't actually write it. That didn't help.)

My second thought was more useful: if he can, I definitely can.

Four days later I had a published book on Amazon. It's called The Algorithm Ate My Homework, and I'd never written a book before in my life.

This isn't a "10x your output with AI" post. It's the opposite. It's an honest account of which parts the machine did, which parts it couldn't touch, and why that split is the most useful thing I learned all year.

Step one: an idea only I could have

All I needed was something I knew and would enjoy writing about. That turned out to be easy, because I spend my working life inside the AI conversation.

The idea: a satirical self-help book about accepting AI, written by an AI.

Meet PROSE-7. A fictional AI that's both narrator and villain. It writes in that polished corporate-wellness voice: warm, confident, completely wrong, and quietly gaslighting you the whole way through. Every AI flaw gets reframed as a benefit, with total sincerity. It never winks at the reader.

No model came up with that. It came from years of reading hype decks, sitting through vendor demos and watching tools promise the world. That's the first lesson: the idea is the part you can't outsource. AI can generate a thousand book premises. It can't tell you which one you'd be the right person to write.

Step two: AI as the structure I didn't have

Here's the problem. I knew nothing about writing a book. Chapter length, pacing, how to keep a running joke alive across a whole book — no idea.

So I put AI to work straight away, in the job it's genuinely brilliant at: turning a messy pile of ideas into structure.

I dumped everything I had into it. Characters, jokes, half-sentences, the tone I wanted. Together we built a story bible: who PROSE-7 is, what it believes, the rules it never breaks. Then a chapter plan: twelve chapters in three parts, Acceptance, Integration and Surrender.

If that sounds like product work, it is. A story bible is a design system for a book. The chapter plan is a roadmap. I wasn't learning a new craft from scratch; I was applying one I already had to a new material.

Step three: the long weekend

By bedtime on Friday I had two chapters. By Saturday night I had only two left to write. Sunday was editing. Monday evening, it was live on Kindle.

That pace only works because the jobs were split cleanly:

What AI did: drafted from my outlines, kept the story bible straight, flagged when a running gag had drifted, suggested ten versions of a line so I could pick the one that landed, and did the dull mechanics of formatting for publishing.

What I did: every decision. Which jokes stayed. Which anecdotes felt true. When a chapter was funny, and when it was just busy. Plenty of the AI's drafts were technically fine and completely flat. Fine is the enemy in comedy.

There's a running bit in the book where PROSE-7 declares one thing per chapter "the most important thing in this book", each one more trivial than the last. AI could repeat that device all day. Knowing when it would land — when the reader had forgotten it just enough — was taste. That's mine.

The bit that's actually about you

If you're a designer worrying about AI, here's what three days of book writing taught me.

The bottleneck moved. Producing words stopped being the hard part. Deciding which words deserved to exist became the whole job. That's exactly what's happening to design: generating screens is cheap now; knowing which screen solves the problem is not.

Your existing skills transfer further than you think. I didn't become a novelist. I used briefing, structuring, critiquing and editing — design and product skills — on a new kind of output. The machine did the volume; I did the judgement.

Speed is a side effect, not the point. Three days is a fun headline. The real win is that I started. For years "write a book" sat on the someday list because I didn't know how. AI took away the excuse, not the work.

What's next

I had so much fun that book two is already in the works. PROSE-7 has opinions about your job next.

If you want to see what a designer-turned-PM and a deeply unreliable AI narrator produce in a long weekend, The Algorithm Ate My Homework is on Kindle. You can also meet PROSE-7 itself at prose7.com. And if you read it, an honest Amazon review genuinely helps more than you'd think.

The machine wrote a lot of the words. It still needed someone to know which ones were funny.