I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking.

However, there is a lot of writing that is basically just an old school from of context engineering. While I would love to think that a PRD is a place to think through ideas, I think many of us have encountered situations, pre-AI, where PRDs were basically context dumps without any real planning or thought.

For these cases, I think we should just drop the premise altogether that you're writing. If you need to write a proposal for something as a matter of ritual, give it AI. If you're documenting a feature to remember context only (and not really explain the larger abstract principles driving it), it's better created as context for an LLM to consume.

Not long ago my engineering team was trying to enforce writing release notes so people could be aware of breaking changes, then people groaned at the idea of having to read this. The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context.

I think it's going to be awhile before the full impact of AI really works it's way through how we work. In the mean time we'll continue to have AI written content fed back into AI and then sent back to someone else (when this could all be a more optimized, closed loop).