Programmer and writer Thomas Ptacek has proposed a deliberately extreme rule for working with AI assistants on your writing. It is not a feature, a product, or a setting — it is a personal policy:

Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.

The idea is simple to state and harder than it sounds to follow. You can use an AI assistant on your drafts all you like — for copyediting, proofreading, and fact-checking. It can flag a dangling modifier, catch a misspelling, tell you that a date is wrong or a claim is unsupported. What it cannot do is supply the words. If it suggests a phrase, a metaphor, a transition, a cleverer way to put something — that suggestion is off limits. Not "use with caution." Off limits entirely.

The logic behind the rule is about AI-generated text having what Ptacek describes as a weird smell — a detectable sameness that readers increasingly recognize, even if they can't name it. Part of that sameness comes from the phrases themselves: certain constructions, transitions, and rhythms that assistants produce constantly and human writers rarely would. Once one of those phrases lands in your paragraph, the paragraph smells faintly of machine, and no amount of your own prose around it fully covers that up.

This is why the rule has to be strict rather than advisory. A softer version — take LLM suggestions only when they're good — fails because the suggestions often sound good in isolation. That's the trap. An assistant's proposed phrasing is usually smooth, plausible, and slightly wrong for you in a way that's hard to notice while you're editing and easy for a reader to notice afterward. A blanket ban removes the judgment call you can't be trusted to make about yourself.

I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that any specific turn of phrase an LLM suggests is off limits.

The "personal protective equipment" framing is doing real work here. PPE isn't about improving your performance — it's about what happens to you when you skip it. Writers who routinely accept suggested phrasing are, over time, letting an average of everyone else's style replace their own. The protection is for the writer's voice, and the cost of the equipment is real: you have to rephrase things yourself, which is slower and occasionally worse in the short run.

Who this is for. Anyone who writes as part of their job and wants AI's help without AI's accent — which describes most professionals now, not just professional writers. If you write reports, memos, newsletters, applications, or posts under your own name, the concern applies to you. It applies less to output nobody reads for voice: a commit message, a data-cleaning script, boilerplate that gets skimmed once. Ptacek himself is a developer and the rule came out of his writing practice, but nothing about it requires technical skill. It's a discipline rule, not a tooling rule.

Can you use it today? Yes — there's nothing to install or buy. It is a rule you apply to yourself, and it's usable immediately with whatever assistant you already have. The honest caveat is that "copyediting" and "suggesting a turn of phrase" sit on a spectrum, not a line. An assistant that proposes rewriting your sentence for clarity is arguably doing both at once, and you'll have to draw that boundary yourself, repeatedly, in real time. Ptacek's position is that erring toward refusal is the point.

There's also a cost worth naming: the rule makes AI less useful for the thing many people want it most for, which is getting unstuck. If your actual workflow is blank page, ask for a draft, edit the draft, this rule eliminates that workflow entirely — and the people proposing it would say that's precisely the benefit, because the draft was never really yours to edit.