I have to produce a great deal of documentation at work for our customers, most of it regulatory and compliance assessments.

Some of the sources I need to use come from agencies in the government or working with the government and are often over a thousand pages long.

So AI has been incredibly helpful here because a lot of what I need to do is map this huge bureaucratic set of guidelines and policies to each customer’s particular situation.

Aware of the sloppy nature of LLMs I created my own workflow that resembles more coding than document drafting.

I use Codex, VSCode and plain markdown, I don’t use MS Word or Copilot like all my other colleagues.

I invest a great deal of time still doing manual labor like researching and selecting my sources, which I then make available for Codex to use as its single source of truth.

I start with a skill that generates the outline which often is longer than it should be. Sometimes I get say a 18 sections outline and I ask Codex to cut it in half. Then I ask for a preliminary draft of each section (each on a separate markdown) and read through and update as necessary, before I ask the agent to develop each section in full, then proof read and update again.

When I’m satisfied I merge all the sections into one single markdown and run another skill to check for repetition, ambiguity, length, etc and usually a few legitimate improvements are recommended.

The whole process can still take me several days to produce a 20-30 pages compliance document, which gets read, verified and approved by myself and others in my team before it goes out.

The productivity gains are pretty obvious, but most importantly I think the content is of better quality for the customer.