Where do I start? There are many things that went on here so I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I loved writing, and I loved it because I love reading. I’d say I love reading more than writing because I still do read. But there was a time of my life where I found great joy in writing, and that coincided with a time of my life that was most creative, which was when I was coding a lot. Coding got my creative juices flowing, and it was fun enough that I kept doing it outside of work, which kept me busy enough, with side projects. Writing was one of the way that also helped me get that creative energy out in productive ways. Don’t expect novel writer here, I did my writing on technical articles tied to what I was learning at work and while I enjoyed the creative writing process, I al…
Where do I start? There are many things that went on here so I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I loved writing, and I loved it because I love reading. I’d say I love reading more than writing because I still do read. But there was a time of my life where I found great joy in writing, and that coincided with a time of my life that was most creative, which was when I was coding a lot. Coding got my creative juices flowing, and it was fun enough that I kept doing it outside of work, which kept me busy enough, with side projects. Writing was one of the way that also helped me get that creative energy out in productive ways. Don’t expect novel writer here, I did my writing on technical articles tied to what I was learning at work and while I enjoyed the creative writing process, I also found the sharing of knowledge meaningful and rewarding because it helped others, based on the comments and feedback I got on my articles.
5 or 6 years ago though, that stopped all of a sudden. I stopped enjoying writing, and it became something I dreaded. The thought of sitting down for a time period to focus on writing became something I dreaded. It’s as I am writing these words that I now realized that it may have been tied to my career transition in engineering management as opposed to the individual contribution track I had been on. I did and do enjoy engineering leadership, but I now realize that a side effect of it might have been that the lack of active coding may have played a part in shutting off my creativity, or at least not kickstarting it the same that coding does. I have been meaning to get back to writing for a while now, but the thought of sitting down and banging out thoughts on keyboard just made me go ugh, and until recently I always pushed it to the back of my mind.
"Not in 2026 ", I told myself late last year as I was reflecting on what I wanted to achieve in the upcoming year, "you’re going to get yourself back in the game Abou, one article a week, and no excuses". I had been mentally preparing myself for it in different ways; I did and do have a lot of ideas about writing topics that come to me randomly, and I have gotten more disciplined about writing them down in Google Keep when I am out and about. The idea being that I would get back to them and flesh them out in that famous moment of everybody’s life where procrastination never happens and things get done: you know exactly, when I am talking about, later. Later never happened so "Not in 2026 again!" I told myself, the first weekend of the year, as I sat down to bang out that first article on my experiences coding with AI over the past year.
(I am psychoanalyzing myself as I am writing these words and it’s crazy that I can now tie the fact that I have been doing a lot of (AI) coding over the past year that I have increasingly felt the need to write again)
Back to the topic though, I sat down then to write, I thought I was ready and hyped myself into it when Crastinator, the professional devil in charge of procrastination (Pro-Crastinator) whispered these sweet words in my ear: "Are you really gonna write for 1 hour, be interrupted again by the kids, or some other distraction, and then step away and never come back to this again? And feel ashamed about it because you know you need to get this done. You promised it to yourself. You’ve been doing a lot of AI assisted coding Abou, there is an easier way to do this, you know it, and it involves AI, you can code that now, write later". Truth be told, the words did make sense.
Crastinator always win when you don’t want to do something in the first place and he’s a pro at it. Developers know this too well, we can sometimes spend too much time attempting to automate something that would have been faster to do manually. Well in this particular variation of this pattern of procrastinated avoidance (don’t look it up, I made it up), instead of writing, I coded Sabati.\
What is Sabati? There will be a more detailed article on it but let’s get it out of the way in the simplest way possible:
Sabati is a AI based task management system that keeps you on track on long running task by nagging... I am sorry, I mean by nudging you.
In this first iteration, it applies the nudging to writing
I hope that makes sense to you but if it does not maybe explaining how I hope it solves my own problem with writing will make it clearer. First, this article you’re reading? I wrote it with Sabati. Full meta monent I know! I started with the idea, which is a version of the current title of the article. I wrote a few sentences, and got prompted with questions, suggestions, and critiques over the past week. It was a trip when I got the first email nudge, at the gym in the morning in between sets. It asked me to consider focusing on either the how I beat procrastination, or the product origin story of Sabati aspect of this story. Sabati kept sending me nudges by email and SMS over the past week, helping me refine the story every time I had time to sit down and write.
It really got me thinking on how to best put this article together and if you’re curious, I thought about it some more, wrote a bit more, and realized that I could not really separate them but it would make sense to just focus on the how I beat procrastination for this story. How am I sure I beat it? Well for me, procrastinating about having to write for one or two hours turned into several feverish nights and weekends over a week to deliver an intelligent task management tool masquerading as a writing platorm. Today I am very pleased to share Sabati with you all, completely free, as a BYOK (Bring Your Own API Key) AI muse to help you push forward with your writing, but even beyond, help you refine your ideas over time. Take a minute and try it for yourself, don’t forget to BYOK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).
I am eating my own dog food, so if you’re curious to hear more about Sabati as a product, I am cooking up that next story right now. I don’t know about you, but I can feel the writing procrastination spirit leaving my body right now.
Take that, Crastinator!