How this blog gets written
How posts and notes here actually get made — AI-assisted, with a structured pass that flags speculation rather than laundering it as fact.
The content on this site is AI-assisted. That’s worth being upfront about, because “AI-assisted” can mean anything from “I had Claude clean up my grammar” to “I gave it a topic and posted whatever fell out”. The setup here is neither.
Why bother
I’ve wanted a maintained blog for years. The problem was never material — between weekly reflections, workplace docs, and the notes I keep while thinking things through, there’s plenty of genuinely-mine content sitting in files I’ll never reread. The problem was the polish tax. Turning a half-thought into something postable took hours per piece, and the cost compounded into “I’ll publish next weekend” forever.
This setup is the lever for that — it drops the cost of getting a thought out of my notes and onto the site far enough that the queue actually moves.
The actual workflow
There’s a Claude skill in this repo for each of the writing tasks — voice, new posts, new notes. When I want to write something, I usually don’t open with a thesis. I open with raw material: a transcript, a PDF, a link, a gripe I want to think out loud about. Claude’s job is to find the post inside that dump, not to dress up something I already wrote.
The loop:
- Read the source material end-to-end — PDFs in full, links fetched and read, transcripts not skimmed.
- Propose a few candidate angles — what the post would argue, not just what it would be about.
- Fact-check sweep, before drafting. Every concrete claim — date, number, attribution, technical specific, “everyone knows” generalisation — gets verified. Anything I’m asserting from vibes gets pushed back on in conversation, not quietly hedged in the draft.
- Draft, with explicit flags on anything that didn’t survive the fact-check. Small uncertainties as inline hedges; larger speculative passages as a labelled aside.
- I sign off line by line. Voice, structure, judgement calls are mine.
The calibration
The point of the flagging is so you can read these posts at the right calibration. If I tell you a thing, I’ve either checked it or I’ve told you I haven’t. If a paragraph is a hot take, it’ll say so. Speculation that reads as fact is the bit of AI-written content I find the most corrosive — once you’ve been burned twice by something confidently wrong, the rest stops being worth reading.