Welcome to the first issue of The Workflow Stack.
Here's a ratio every engineer knows: the simulation takes a day, the report takes three. That ratio is broken, and this is the workflow that fixes it. I use it on every technical report I write.
Step 1: Structure first
Before any AI touches the draft, write the skeleton yourself: Objective → Methods → Results → Conclusions, one bullet each. If you can't state the conclusion in one sentence, go back to the data. AI is a drafting tool, not a thinking tool — the thinking is your job and always will be.
Step 2: AI drafts the methods section
Paste your raw run notes after this prompt:
"Draft a Methods section for a technical report from the notes below. Audience: a client engineer who knows the physics but not this model. Style: plain technical prose, past tense, no marketing language. Rules: use ONLY the values and settings in my notes — never invent, estimate, or round a number. Flag anything ambiguous with [CHECK] instead of guessing. Keep it under 400 words."
Two things make this prompt work: the audience line (it sets the technical depth) and the [CHECK] rule (it turns silent guessing into visible flags you can resolve).
Step 3: The accuracy pass — non-negotiable
Read the draft against your source files, line by line, every number. AI confidently invents values — a plausible-looking heat transfer coefficient that appears nowhere in your data. This pass is the entire difference between "AI helped me write faster" and "AI helped me publish something wrong." Budget real time for it. It still beats writing from a blank page.
Step 4: The polish pass
Tone consistency, clarity, terminology. The small errors that make a client quietly doubt the analysis. This is also where a grammar checker earns its keep — narrow job, catch what tired eyes miss at 4 PM on a Friday. It doesn't understand your physics; that's what Step 3 was for.
Honest downsides
The prompt needs tuning per report type. A test report and a CFD validation report want different audiences and different rules. Expect two or three iterations before it clicks.
AI drafts are verbose. "Keep it under 400 words" helps, but you'll still cut.
If your notes are chaos, the draft will be chaos. Garbage in, garbage out — the workflow doesn't fix bad note-taking.
That's the workflow. Total time for a methods section that used to eat half a day: about an hour, with the accuracy pass being most of it.
If you want the exact prompt plus four more templates (code-review checklist, meeting debrief, weekly planner, run-log starter), they're in the free Engineer's AI Workflow Pack — grab it via the subscribe form.
See you Friday,
Rajib