I couldn’t find a great mortgage reference guide.
I’ve bought plenty of them, the kind that promise to “explain the mortgage process from start to finish.” Some were fine, most were just preachy and sales, but even the best always stopped right when things got interesting.
If you work in mortgage tech, you know what I mean. There’s this invisible layer of knowledge that lives between the official documentation and the people who actually touch loans every day. Loan officers, processors, underwriters — they just know things. The context, the nuances, the real meaning behind those forms and fields. I’ve always had a better understanding of things when I saw the “why” behind the “what.”
I was familiar with the terms I hear constantly, but not the depth. Business could always explain why they wanted this specific ask, but it was hard to be of more value.
So I decided to build my own reference. This is something I wish existed when I started: a guide that connects all the dots between tech, compliance, and operations. Something you could read and actually get why certain things happen the way they do inside Encompass, ICE, or any LOS.
And here’s the part that surprises people:
I wrote this first draft in about a week. But “wrote” might not be the right word.
I used GPT the whole way through. Not as an author, but as an amplifier. I gave it structure, tone, and direction. I told it what to cover, how to explain it, and who the audience was. Then I edited, fact-checked, reworded, and shaped every section until it sounded right.
So who actually wrote it?
Me? GPT? Both?
If I told it, “Write a chapter explaining the timing requirements of TRID,” and then rewrote that section line by line, does that make it mine?
What if I copied a chapter it drafted mostly clean, but edited for accuracy and phrasing? Still mine?
That’s where it gets fuzzy.
It’s the Ship of Theseus thing. The way it was explained to me was that if you had a ship, and you replaced a single plank, is it still your ship? What if you had to replace half? Okay, what about the entire deck. Is it still your ship? What if over the course of two years, you had to replace every single board and part on that ship? Now every single piece is different from when you initially got it. Is it still your ship? You would easily say no if it was done in a day, but over the course of two years? I’m not sure.
This book came together the same way. I didn’t sit down and type every word myself, but I replaced, refined, and rebuilt so much of it that what exists now feels like it’s mostly mine. The scaffolding started with GPT, but the continued refinement will definitely separate that ownership.
And it’s still not done. There’s a lot of editing to do. People are reviewing sections for accuracy, tone, and clarity. Some chapters will get torn apart and rewritten completely. But that’s part of the process: iteration, not authorship. So, in reality, this can’t ever be mine. It’ll be a part of all the people that made it possible.
When it’s ready, I’ll probably just make it available for whoever wants it. I’m not looking to make money off it. I just wanted to build the kind of resource I couldn’t find. I wanted something that actually explains this industry the way people inside it understand it.
So if someone asks who the author is, I’ll say:
I am, sort of. With Chat GPT, and a lot of help from a lot of friends. GPT helped build the ship. We’re just sanding the edges, and we will be for some time.