# Autonomous Content Pipeline

> The experiment I keep extending: a pipeline that carries a piece from rough draft to a published note and its social posts, with as little hand-holding in the middle as I can get away with.

## The stages

Four steps, each one I'm trying to make hands-off: a raw draft comes in, an agent rewrites it into my voice, the note gets wired into the rest of the garden, and the same content gets turned into social posts. The point isn't to remove myself, it's to move my attention to the two ends, the draft and the check, and let the machine own the middle.

## Draft

It starts with a rough draft: structure and raw material, not finished prose. Usually that's a messy braindump plus a rough outline of the argument. The draft only has to be right about what it wants to say, not how it says it.

## AI rewrite

An agent rewrites the draft into something that reads like me instead of a chatbot, stripping the inflated claims, the stock phrasing, and the tics that give a model away. Making that consistent is the hard part, and it's the same lesson as [What I learned experimenting with OpenClaw for analyst workflows](/garden/openclaw-analyst-workflows): the rewrite is only reliable when there's a clear contract for what "in my voice" means, the way [Spec-driven development with OpenSpec and AI agents](/garden/spec-driven-development-with-openspec) pins down a task before any work starts.

## Linkages

A note isn't finished until it's connected. This step finds where a new piece touches the existing garden and wires the wikilinks both ways, so the graph stays dense instead of a drawer of orphans. The [A content compiler that runs at build time](/garden/build-time-content-compiler) does the mechanical half, resolving links and backlinks at build time; the judgement of what should link to what is the part I'm trying to hand over.

## Social posts

The last step spends the content again: the same note becomes a LinkedIn writeup and whatever other platform posts fit, each shaped for where it lands rather than copy-pasted from the note. One piece of thinking, several surfaces.

This is the least built-out stage, so it holds most of what's still on the list, and it's the one place the pipeline still leans on me. Image generation runs through Gemini today, but I write and paste every prompt by hand. The goal is one skill, running in the dev container, that reads a finished note and drives each model itself, so none of this needs me typing a prompt:

* **Generate the thumbnail and inline images.** [Writing the thumbnail prompt from the note](/garden/a-skill-that-writes-my-thumbnail-prompts) is already a skill; what's left is having it call the model, instead of me hand-feeding Gemini each one.
* **Build the animated diagrams.** The skill has the agent read the note's structure and generate the looping clips itself, the same way every run, instead of me drawing or prompting each one.
* **Draft concise, platform-shaped copy.** An agent turns the note into a LinkedIn writeup and an Instagram caption sized for each surface, with no separate writing pass from me.
* **Connect the posting APIs.** Wire LinkedIn and Instagram in directly so the finished bundle publishes to each without a manual copy-paste at the end.

## How autonomous, really

Not fully, and that's deliberate. I still set the contract at the start and check the result at the end; the pipeline owns the middle. Handing the middle over only works because a broken run cannot ship: the [safety net of CI, Snyk, and Dependabot](/garden/securing-the-repo) blocks a red build from merging and keeps a vulnerable dependency from sitting unnoticed. It's the same split the rest of [This garden, and how it’s built](/garden/this-digital-garden) runs on: the human decides what "done" means, the machine does the work inside those lines. The open question is how much of the middle I can give away before the checking costs more than it saves.