The quiet help that lets you get back to making things
October 31, 2025
Author Joanna Maciejewska has a quote that has been living in my brain since I saw it:
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
That resonates with me because I like to think that technology and art are both positive forces in the world. Laundry, at least in my house, is chaotic neutral at best. Creative workflows, like most thought-work, is part laundry and part art. There's a lot that needs to be done to get the outcome you want - organizing, recalling, spellchecking, and so on.
Part of the problem there is that it's easy to mistake the process of creative work for the product of creative work. Noted philospher Jack Sparrow puts it best:
That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.
We live in a world with an incredible array of tools at our easy disposal, including some very new and very powerful ones. The problem is, they're often pointed at the wrong problem. LLM-powered assistants are a shiny new toy, and the temptation is to press the big red button that promises to do all the work for you. But that's a mistake, at least for me. It feels like a shortcut, but it skips over the very work where my own judgment and taste are supposed to come in. The output is often plausible, but it doesn't have a soul; it doesn't connect to the other threads of the story in a way that feels earned.
After a few of these shallow victories, I realized I was pointing the tool at the wrong problem. The real bottleneck in my creative process wasn't a shortage of ideas, but the frustrating half-hour-plus of puttering-around required to get back into a project. The "work about work" was remembering which NPC had the secret, what detail I’d improvised last session that was now canon, or which brilliant insight from three weeks ago was buried in a pile of transcripts.
That's the right job for an assistant. The tool is at its best when it's doing the tedious assembly so I have more time and energy for the actual productive thinking. So now, instead of asking it to create, I ask it to prepare. I don't say "open my campaign notes" anymore. I ask:
The thing that makes a great creative assistant is context. They need to understand what you're working on and what you're trying to accomplish, so that they can bring the right information to hand.
AI (LLMs, really) are great at putting words next to words in a way that sounds authoritative. "Truthy." They're good at that because people write a lot on the internet, and computers can do math on a scale that is truly incredible. But that's not the same as doing the work of creative writing.
So let's use that to our advantage. One of the things we can point that math at is semantic retrieval. As our campaign grows, there's a lot of context in there that isn't really sorted or organized in any meaningful way. I certainly don't have the time or energy to put into acting as a librarian for my own campaign. In some sense, the problem is that I don't know what I'm going to want to ask in advance, because I'm not organizing the plot of a novel, I'm trying to herd my cats-I-mean-players into something that makes some kind of sense.
My notes are pretty free-form as a result. Which makes them a great fit for what's called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Here's the basic idea:
Once you've got that, you can do some pretty cool things. It's a powerful tool because the search isn't "find these words" or "check this category", which is generally what we've been stuck with in the past. I can ask something quite vague, like "who was that character who was kind of funny in the dwarven city a few sessions ago?", and get a pretty good answer. That saves me several minutes of hunting through my notes, numerous times per session prep, even on a relatively small campaign. It's the difference between an exhausting three hours of prep and a refreshing thirty minutes.
This shift in approach has changed how I start a work session. When I’m prepping for a game, my first step is to ask the assistant for a clean recap of my last batch of notes. It pulls the threads, reminds me of open loops, and hands me a starting point. A task that used to take me twenty minutes of scrolling and skimming now takes thirty seconds, and I can dive right into the creative part.
The goal is to shorten the distance between having an idea and acting on it, and the biggest obstacle is often just the clutter from work I've already done. Protecting that creative momentum is the whole point. Every time I have to switch from thinking about the story to hunting for a file, a little bit of that energy is lost. By handing off the "work about work," I can stay in the creative moment more consistently. That so-callled flow state is so, so rewarding.
This isn't about replacing the messy, human parts of creativity. It's about delegating the parts that were never very creative in the first place. The filing, the searching, the remembering—these are chores. A good assistant does them quietly in the background so I can focus on the work only I can do.
In the end, it’s just another way to be lazy in the way that I admire: deliberately, and in the service of freeing up my brain for the fun parts. If you're interested in using an assistant to trim the "work about work", give Campaign Arks a try.