Who Is This Document For?
There is a mental model of AI-assisted correspondence that I held until quite recently, and I suspect most people still hold it. It goes like this: two humans exchange messages about shared work. Each of them might have an AI helping — polishing prose, summarizing a long thread, drafting a first version. But the correspondence itself is still human-to-human. The AI is a writing aid, the way a spell-checker is a writing aid. The loop is: I think, my assistant helps me say it, you read it, your assistant helps you answer.
That model quietly died on me over the last few weeks, and I want to describe what replaced it, because the replacement is different in kind, not degree.