Keep the First Draft

Think of a photocopy of a photocopy, each copy made from the last one, laid face down on the glass. By the tenth copy, the letters have thickened and grey has crept in from the edges.

Every copy matches the sheet it was made from, but none of them matches the original.

Version six of your draft is good, because five rounds of changes with the AI made it tight and smooth. Each round improved on the last, and every paragraph earns its place.

Read the draft now, though, and you can't remember what you were trying to say.

No sentence has gone missing from the page. The reason has.

The reason is whatever made you start writing, and you can't point to the round where it left, because every round looked like progress.

Mia Kiraki writes a newsletter called Robots Ate My Homework, and she tested this with pictures. She passed an image through a chain of AI changes, one after another, and watched the original idea fade, one sensible step at a time.

The conclusion is hers, and so is the way of putting it. An AI that only sees the latest version will never protect your original idea, because the AI has no idea what the original was.

AI does what you asked, but the page you gave the AI was already two copies away from what you meant.

This slow drifting away happens to anything that gets passed along and changed. But AI makes each change so quick and so smooth that the original can be gone by teatime.

Keep the first draft.

Save the rough version before you change anything, and keep it untouched in its own file.

Call it v0, and above it, write one line saying what the piece is for and what it must say. For example, "This is to tell the team the deadline moved and that it wasn't their fault."

That sentence is the first thing to wear away, so pin it down while it's still clear to you.

Then give the AI that one line every time you ask for changes, and send the latest version along with it.

Here's what this piece is for, in one line. [intent]. Here's the current draft. [paste]. Improve [the thing you want improved], but check every change against that one line. If a change would make the piece say that line less clearly, don't make the change, and tell me why.

On every third round, put v0 and the current version side by side and ask what went missing.

Here's my original rough draft and here's the current version after several rounds of changes. Tell me what the original said or meant that the current version no longer does. Be specific, and quote the lost line or idea. Then tell me whether each loss looks like an improvement or a drift away from what I meant.

Some losses will be improvements, and some will be the reason you started.

Only you can tell which, and only with v0 open in front of you. What needs putting back is usually a line, or even a word. Often the rough version of that line beats the polished one, because you wrote the rough one while you still knew what you meant.

The habit costs ten seconds a piece.

Sometimes the first draft was wrong, and moving away from it was the piece finding its shape. Keep v0 anyway, and look at it, because any move away from v0 should be a decision you made.

For a short email you change twice, skip all of this, with no saved versions and no one-line summary.

Everything else gets one test, which is whether you'd be annoyed to lose the point.

If the answer is yes, keep v0. If you can't remember the point by the second round of changes, you've learned which kind of piece it was.

The original, still on the glass.

With thanks to Mia Kiraki. The line "an AI that only sees the latest version will never protect your original idea" is hers. It comes from her experiment on passing work along, on Robots Ate My Homework (July 2026).