How to brief an AI agent so the draft sounds like you

How to brief an AI agent so the draft sounds like you

Most "AI wrote this" content reads like AI wrote it because the brief was lazy. "Write a blog post about X" gets you a Wikipedia summary with a personality transplant. Here's what actually moves a draft from generic to *yours* — the inputs Quill asks for before writing a word.

Give it your point of view, not just the topic

A topic is "marketing automation." A point of view is "marketing automation should make humans decide *more*, not less — automate the typing, keep the judgement." The second one has an argument. Arguments are what people remember and link to.

Show it three things you've already written

Voice is concrete, not abstract. "Friendly but sharp" means nothing. Three real samples — an email, a landing section, a Slack message — tell an agent your actual cadence: how long your sentences run, whether you use em dashes, whether you swear. Quill reads the samples, not the adjectives.

Name the reader and the one thing they should do

• Who is this for? A founder who's never done SEO reads differently than a CMO who has.
• What should change after they read it? Sign up, run an audit, share it with a colleague? One action,

named up front, keeps the whole piece pointed.

Hand over the proof

The fastest way to make a draft credible is to give the agent your real numbers, quotes, and examples. An agent will never invent a customer story — and it shouldn't. Feed it the true ones:

• A metric you actually moved.
• A sentence a real customer actually said.
• The specific objection you keep hearing on sales calls.

Then steer, don't rewrite

The first draft is a starting point, not a verdict. The highest-leverage edit isn't fixing commas — it's telling the agent *why* a paragraph is wrong: "too salesy," "this is the part that matters, expand it," "cut the intro, start at the second paragraph." Steering teaches the next draft. Rewriting teaches nothing.

You steer, they ship. The brief is the steering wheel.

Do this and the byline stops mattering. The draft sounds like you because it's built from you — your view, your voice, your proof. The agent just types faster than you can.