Writing with Cowork
Writing with Cowork
Outline First, Draft Second, Always
AI-written drafts collapse because the structure isn't yours.
You ask Cowork to write the proposal. Thirty seconds later you have twelve fluent paragraphs. They read well. The sentences are clean, the transitions are smooth, nothing is misspelled.
Then you read it a second time, slowly, and something is off. The argument arrives in the wrong order. The point that should anchor page one shows up on page three. There's a whole section you didn't need and a decision you did need that never got made. You start cutting and dragging paragraphs, and an hour later you've rebuilt the thing from scratch.
The prose was never the problem. The skeleton was. You asked for a finished draft before anyone (you or Cowork) had agreed on what the draft was supposed to do.
The fix is to separate two jobs that feel like one: deciding the structure, and filling it with words. Do the first one yourself, out loud, before you let Cowork do the second.