my tone of voice is changing
So here's something I've been thinking about. I use AI to help me write. Not all of it, but a lot of it. Drafts, rewrites, editing, brainstorming. Claude is basically my writing partner at this point. I'm not apologetic about it, but I am paying attention to what it's doing to the way I sound.
Because here's the thing: getting AI to write like you takes a lot of work. By default it sounds like any over-the-top professional copywriter. Competent. Clear. (Painfully clear, sometimes.) But it's not you. It takes real effort to get past that generic polish and into something that actually resembles how you think and talk.
So I decided to fix it. A few months ago (that's years in AI speak) Anthropic released this concept called skills for Claude Code, basically a way to give Claude persistent instructions about how to do specific things. I figured: what if I defined a skill that captures the way I actually write? My tone, my rhythm, the weird habits I didn't even know I had.
To do that, I needed material. A lot of it. So I started digging.
I pulled blog posts from this site. I dug up personal docs, old newsletters, random drafts I never published. And then I went further back, to the old blog. The one from 2008-2015ish, back when I was writing R tutorials and rambling about optimization problems. Fifteen-ish years of my own writing, just sitting there.
And that's where things got uncomfortable.
Because the voice across that corpus isn't consistent at all. Obviously some of that is just life. You write differently at 25 than at 39. The early technical stuff reads like a different person, and it basically is one. That's fine. Expected, even.
But some of the drift isn't natural. Somewhere in the last couple of years, this particular pattern crept in. Short. Punchy. Beat. Beat. Beat. These staccato sentence fragments that feel like someone's doing a TED talk impression. "Built a thing. Shipped it. Moved on." That kind of energy.
I didn't used to write like that. That's not me. (Or at least it wasn't.) That's AI influence leaking into my actual voice.
It happens slowly. You prompt, you get output, you edit it, you absorb a bit of its rhythm, you start writing that way even when the AI isn't involved. It's subtle. I didn't notice it until I had years of my own writing sitting side by side.
Anyway. The skill is defined now, and I'm pretty happy with it. It took a few rounds of analysis and iteration but the result is something that actually captures how I think on the page. The rhythm, the parenthetical asides (hi), the way I soften things with "I guess" and "I don't know." Getting it right felt like looking in a slightly better mirror.
But it left me with a bigger question that I can't quite shake. What even is a personal tone of voice in 2026?
If a significant chunk of written communication is being drafted, edited, or at least shaped by the same handful of models, then "how you write" starts to mean something different. Everyone's getting smoothed out by the same filters. The rough edges, the weird habits, the specific rhythms that make your writing yours, those are exactly the things that get normalized away.
I'm not saying this is catastrophic. I don't think personal voice is dead or whatever. But I do think it's blurring. And I think most people haven't noticed yet, the same way I didn't notice until I looked at fifteen years of my own words and saw the seams.
I guess defining the skill was partly an act of preservation. Like, here's how I actually sound, pinned down before the models smooth it out completely. Whether that's a meaningful thing to do or just a weird form of nostalgia, I honestly don't know.