We Need a Name for This New Thing

Or: How I Produced a 300-Page Book in Three Months Using AI

Something new is happening in creative production, and we don’t have a name for it yet.

Not ghostwriting. Not pure AI generation. Not traditional authorship. What do you call it when AI touches every single part of the creative process?

Producer? Director? AI-augmented authorship?

No idea. But I just used this process to create a 300-page book called The Velocity of Hope. Doing things is the best way to learn how they work.

The Setup

Three months ago I had:

• Years of reading about economic history
• Strong opinions about growth and prosperity
• A conviction that people need to understand what rapid transformation feels like
• Zero confidence I could write a full book alone (especially a historical, dialog driven one)
• No interest in spending 2-3 years on something that could be done in 3 months

Enter Claude Opus 4.1.

How It Actually Worked

Month 1: Research Overdrive Claude read 15+ books with me. Analyzed primary sources. Found contradictions. Suggested better data. Verified statistics. Caught errors in my thinking. Generated hypotheses. Proposed narrative structures. All simultaneously. My job became filtering and choosing, not searching and compiling.

Month 2: Production at Machine Speed Claude drafted sections while fact-checking them. Researched 1930s German prices while writing the scene that needed them. Found worker testimonies while crafting their perspectives. Every sentence could be researched, written, verified, and revised in the time it used to take to write a first draft.

Month 3: Parallel Processing Revision Claude spotted inconsistencies across chapters. Checked if chapter 3’s wage data matched chapter 7’s claims. Verified dates across the entire manuscript. Suggested twenty structural improvements while I was still processing the first five.

The bottleneck was me deciding which of the ten valid approaches to take.

What This Actually Means

The limiting factor is human processing speed Claude can generate ten interpretations of the same historical event, with sources for each, in thirty seconds. I need an hour to properly evaluate them. It can write five different versions of a chapter opening. I need time to feel which one works.

Every part of the process accelerates Research, writing, fact-checking, revision, consistency checking, source verification. All happening in parallel. All faster than human cognition can manage. You become a router for high-bandwidth information flows.

Speed changes what’s possible A 300-page book in 3 months is about fundamentally different processes. Like going from walking to driving. You cover more ground not because you’re moving your legs faster.

The human role gets weird You’re simultaneously the slowest part of the system and the most important. Every decision flows through you. But you’re choosing between pre-researched, pre-verified, pre-written options. It’s exhausting in a completely new way.

What I Learned

1. Modern AI touches everything. Not just writing. Not just research. Every single step from conception to final draft can involve AI. The question becomes where you want it involved, not where it’s capable of contributing.

2. Cognitive load is the new constraint. I’d end days mentally fried not from creating but from processing and deciding. Like being a chess player analyzing computer-generated moves at 10x speed.

3. Quality comes from curation at scale. Generate ten options, pick the best, improve it, generate ten variations, pick again. Quality through selection pressure rather than craftsmanship.

4. Verification becomes continuous. Claude fact-checks while writing. Cross-references while revising. You stop thinking in terms of “research phase” and “writing phase.” Everything happens simultaneously.

5. The work becomes curatorial. Less “what should I write?” More “is this the right version?” Less creation, more selection and refinement. You’re conducting an orchestra that plays faster than you can think.

The Uncomfortable Questions

Who’s the “real” author? Wrong question. It’s like asking who “really” made a movie. The process is inherently collaborative now. I made thousands of decisions. Claude executed them plus suggested thousands more.

Is this cheating? Cheating at what? The goal is creating valuable work, not proving I can personally type 300 pages. The research is real. The insights are real. The value is real.

What happens to traditional writing? Same thing that happened to hand-copying manuscripts. Still exists for specific purposes. But most production moves to the new process because it’s 10x faster.

Will everything become AI slop? Yes, tons of it. Also tons of things that couldn’t exist before. The range expands in all directions. More garbage. More gems. More everything.

Why This Matters

The tools now touch every part of creative production. Not just assistance. Not just automation. Full parallel processing across all dimensions of creating written work.

The constraint shifted from production capacity to human processing speed. From “can I write this?” to “can I manage this?”

What could you create if the only limit was your ability to make decisions fast enough?

What’s trapped in your head because you thought it would take years to produce?

I produced a 300-page book in 3 months. Not through superhuman effort. Through a fundamentally different process where the bottleneck was my ability to process options, not generate them.

This is new! We need a name for it. We also need to start using it before we spend three years debating what to call it.

The book is free to read online at [https://velocityofhope.joonaheino.com/]. Judge for yourself what this new process produces.

(Captain Phillips somali pirate voice) “You are the bottleneck now”))