Good morning.
A lot of you told me the same thing in the reader survey: a quick five-minute job in Claude or ChatGPT turns into a thirty-minute back and forth, and the draft you finish with can be worse than the second one.
A freelance video editor I work with had the same spiral with his clients, cut it by two thirds, and the move that did it works just as well in a chat window.
In today's issue: why a chat goes in circles after the second draft, the plan check that stops it before it starts, and the reset for when you're already three rounds in.
—Sam
How A Video Editor Cut His Revision Rounds
He edits for three YouTube channels and a course business, bills about $118,000 a year, and until May sent every client a finished cut to watch and mark up. The average video went through 2.8 rounds of re-edits before anyone signed off.
Then he wrote a saved prompt that turns the raw footage transcript into an edit plan: hook options, where each segment starts and ends, suggested cuts with timestamps, and the claims that need b-roll or text on screen. The plan goes to the client before he opens the timeline.
Across 47 videos since May, revision rounds fell from 2.8 to 0.9 and turnaround went from six days to two. He went from nine videos a month to sixteen without a hire, roughly $41,000 a year at his existing rates.
His explanation is about cost: changing a plan takes about twenty minutes, and each re-edit it prevents would have taken hours. All he moved was the approval, to the point where a change is cheap. Two of his four clients have mentioned the catch, which is that they now do their reviewing earlier.
Why A Chat Goes In Circles After The Second Draft
When you ask Claude for the finished email, you're the client watching the cut. The draft comes back mostly right with the angle slightly off, so you ask for one fix, and the model rewrites the whole piece to make it and moves two things you liked along the way, because your note only said what to change.
Now you're correcting the correction. By round four the thread holds three drafts you've turned down, and the model keeps pulling phrases and structure back out of them, so the longer you stay in that chat, the harder the version you want is to reach.
The Plan Check Before Any Draft
In a chat, the same move means getting the plan approved before the draft. Add this to the end of any request where you'd normally get a finished piece back.
Before you write anything, show me your plan in six lines or fewer:
1. Who this is for
2. The one thing it needs them to do or believe
3. The order of the main points
4. The first sentence
5. Roughly how long it will run
6. Anything you're guessing at because I didn't tell you
Then stop and wait. If I change the plan, show me the revised plan.
Write the full piece only when I say go.The last item saves the most time, because the guesses are where the spiral starts, and at this stage each one costs a sentence to fix. Say you coach founders and ask ChatGPT for the launch email for your January group program. The plan comes back aimed at people who've never hired a coach, when your list is mostly past clients, and one line fixes it before four hundred words go to the wrong reader.
When you do correct a draft, name what stays as well as what changes (keep the opening and the offer paragraph, cut the second story), so the rewrite only touches the parts you named.
The Reset For A Chat Already Three Rounds In
If you're past the second correction and still not there, stop replying in that thread and paste this instead:
Stop drafting. Write one prompt that would get the version I want
on the first try, using everything in this conversation:
- what I asked for
- every correction I made
- the parts of your drafts I said to keep
Leave the rejected drafts out of it.
I'm going to paste it into a new chat.Open a new chat (inside the same Claude or ChatGPT project, if you use one, so your files come with it) and paste the prompt in. The new chat starts from one clean instruction, with no rejected drafts to pull from.
If the same corrections turn up in that prompt every week, they're rules about how you write. They belong in the dated rules file from Make AI Sound Like You (New Tactics), so you stop typing them into every reset.
One Question Before You Go
One tap tells me how often this happens to you, and the answers decide how much more of it I cover.
How many rounds does an AI draft usually take before you'd send it?
Last Byte
After a few spirals like this, plenty of the entrepreneurs I work with stop giving that kind of job to AI and go back to writing it themselves, which costs far more than thirty minutes a week.
The editor added seven videos a month by moving one approval.
Pick the job you fix three times most often, ask for the plan first, and count the rounds.
Both prompts work while you're in the chat. In an upcoming issue, Cortex members get the version for drafts you'd rather not supervise:
Standards that grow every time you edit, and a check that tells you which drafts can go out without you reading every line.
In Cortex, I share the formulas and strategies that help busy online business owners implement AI and Agents inside their businesses, in just minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.
Talk soon,
Sam Woods
The Editor
