Hey there. Fancy seeing you here. It had been a while since there’d been any activity on this blog because honestly, I’ve been staring at this blog’s drafts folder way too much. It’s not for lack of things I’d like to say. There’s always an idea and a full folder of Drafts — if you’ve followed this blog long enough you know that ideas aren’t my problem. It’s the gap between “I should write about that” and actually writing it that gets me every time. The blank page, staring back. The cursor blinking. The tab getting closed. All that and my day job, work, the dogs, golf, the existential dread of the next fresh outrage from the current US government. I haven’t made writing the committed practice it should be, turning all those ideas into words, words into sentences, and then into something cohesive that gets posted here.
So I’ve been experimenting. And because this is sometimes a blog about technology, I figure I should talk about what I’m experimenting with.
This post was drafted with help from an AI.
This post was drafted with help from an AI. Specifically, Claude — running inside a tool called Cowork that connected directly to this WordPress blog via MCP. Claude Cowork read my recent blog posts, got a sense of my voice, and with some prompting from me on the topic helped me move from a rough topic to an actual draft. I reviewed it, made changes, then had the AI push the draft into WordPress’s Draft’s folder where I did a final rewrite/edit.
The experience has me thinking about something I’ve watched happen over and over again in the nearly two decades I’ve been writing things online. Every few years, the tools change. The ground shifts and every time they change, someone worries the soul goes out of the thing.
Long before I started regularly writing online back in 2007, publishing on the web meant knowing at least some HTML. Maybe not hardcore code — you didn’t have to be a developer — but you had to care enough to learn the basics. You hand-coded your layout, your links, your line breaks, put words in the right tags and hoped for the best. It was a barrier. Not everyone cleared it.
Then came desktop blogging apps, the WYSIWYG page layout products, and the first social “webrings”. WordPress.com got simple enough that the technical scaffolding all but disappeared. Soon mobile apps meant you could post from a park bench or an airport gate. Before long tools like IFTTT let you automate the whole thing (until they didn’t — ask me how I know). Each wave lowered the friction between “I want to say something” and “I’ve published something.” Each wave brought more voices in.
AI tools — agents, assistants, things with acronyms like MCP that connect them directly to your apps and accounts — are the next wave on that same shore.
The difference is that this time, the tools aren’t just affecting delivery. They’re more actively helping with creation. A system that can read everything you’ve written, understand your voice, and help you move from a vague idea to a coherent first draft is a fundamentally different kind of tool than a WYSIWYG editor. It’s closer to having a collaborator who understands your style, at least at a basic level, and shows up to your next writing session ready to help you start. (Whether that’s exciting or unsettling probably says something about your relationship with the blank page.)
But here’s what I keep coming back to: it still doesn’t write the blog. It didn’t have this idea. It didn’t know what I think about the evolution of blogging tools, or why the blank page gets me specifically, or that I’ve been mulling this over for weeks. Those things are still mine. What the tools do is take the spark — the idea, the angle, the voice — and help light the blaze. The authorship stays human. The perspective, the specificity, the experience, the final edit — all of that still has to come from the person at the keyboard.
Photography went through something similar. The darkroom gave way to Photoshop, which gave way to Lightroom presets, which gave way to AI editing tools that can now do in seconds what used to take an afternoon. And nobody confuses a well-processed photograph with a well-composed one. The seeing is still yours. The tools just try to get out of the way of the making.
The AI helped me do a better job of being me
It’s also important to state that I had Claude learn only from my own work to help me do a better job of being me. There are a lot of incredibly valid concerns that AI tools — image and video generators and agents like Cowork — have been trained or can be trained to do replicate some other human’s style. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when you have computer program slurp up another artist’s work to make something for yourself that looks or sounds the same, that’s just stealing.
If the hardest part of blogging more consistently has always been getting from idea to first draft, and the tools available right now can help close that gap, then maybe the things I’ve been meaning to write will actually get written. More of them, more often. That seems worth trying.
I guess you’ll see here how it goes.
