I'm Katie Parrott. I make stuff with words.

Essays, apps, and agents — because words are magic.

I obsess over AI and work at Every, make things like Tastemaker, and spend too much time teaching machines to sound like me. Mostly I'm trying to figure out how technology changes how work feels — by sharing how it's changing how it feels to me.

What I'm Working On

Every

Staff Writer + AI Editorial Lead

I write, test, and build with AI, then report what works for me so others can decide what works for them.

The Curiosity Gap

Author

My personal Substack. Longer, weirder, more confessional. The stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else.

Tastemaker

Creator

An AI writing tool that learns what good writing is to you, then teaches it back to you.

tastemaker.bot

Bible Study

Side Project

A secular Bible study — reading scripture as literature, history, and weird ancient storytelling.

Explore the atlas

Current fixations

What I'm Thinking About

A running list of the questions that keep leaking out of what I'm publishing, testing, and building.

Current questions: How much access makes an agent useful before the doors need better locks? Do robot reviewers help me do better work, or just make the process look sophisticated? Can AI make me feel more alive without taking over the rest of my life?
01

Agents + trust boundaries

Letting agents into the work without handing them the house

I keep turning coding agents into writing rooms, research assistants, app builders, and knowledge-work operating systems. The live question is how much access makes them genuinely useful before the doors I opened need better locks.

02

Writing + robot reviewers

Making my robot editorial board earn its keep

I can send a draft through a small fleet of AI reviewers before a human ever sees it. The live question is whether they catch problems that improve the work or merely produce an impressive pile of feedback around the same old draft.

03

AI + embodiment

Protecting the person the machine helped bring back

AI returned me to a kind of intellectual aliveness I thought I'd lost, then made it possible to neglect the sleep, meals, friendships, dog walks, and scripture that keep that aliveness attached to a human body.

Selected Essays

Changelog

My Editor Caught Me Sounding Like AI. Now AI Catches Me First.

I wrote about why the most useful file in my AI writing system is a list of ways I disappoint my editors.

Read on Every

Designing benchmarks is harder than it looks

Every time I thought my writing benchmark was ready, I found another methodological problem that made the results impossible to trust, and started over. Building the test was harder than testing the models.

The Theology of Closing the Laptop

On AI, Magnifica Humanitas, and protecting the person the machine helped bring back

Read on Substack

Don't add an MCP to your website before a technical review

I gave AI agents a door into Tastemaker, then learned the door had more access than it should have. The connection is offline until its data-access design gets a thorough technical review. Turns out you check the locks before you invite the agent in.

Vibe Check: Opus 4.8—Anthropic Should’ve Rounded Up to 5

Opus 4.8 is the most complete model Every has tested yet: a jump back to the top on senior-engineering and writing benchmarks, stronger for everyday knowledge work, and good enough to make Claude tempting again—even if the app still lags the model.

Read on Every