I Built a Blog Writing Factory So I'd Actually Write

I built a blog writing factory in Python last weekend. Not because I wanted to write a blog — I have a Notion graveyard of half-finished posts to prove I do not — but because every time I sat down to write one, the same 30 minutes of 'where do I save the draft, what tone am I using, do I have a checklist' ate the actual writing.

So I made the factory eat the 30 minutes instead. Here is what it does and why.The wallNone of the decisions I was making were hard. Should this be 600 words or 1,200? Which tone? Am I in the right voice? What did I write about last month? Did I cover this already? What counts as "done"?None of those are hard questions. Stacked together, they are a wall. I would sit down to write a post, do 15 minutes of "where do I start," decide I was not in the right headspace, and close the laptop. The post never got written. The blog sat at four posts for fourteen months.That is the part I am most embarrassed about. The 30 minutes of decision-making was the actual content, and I kept treating it like the preamble.What the factory is, exactlyA small Python script. About 400 lines. It does five things in order:Take a seed. A one-line idea. (e.g. "why my prompts kept failing at work")Generate an outline. Three to seven sections, each with a one-sentence purpose.Draft each section. Run a "voice prompt" first, then a "section prompt" per section. Voice is from two or three sample posts you feed it.Edit pass. Strips AI slop, kills em-dashes, tightens sentences, checks the lede.Output a publish-ready markdown file with frontmatter (title, description, tags, date) and a recommendation: publish, revise, or kill.That is it. There is no magic. The factory is the same prompts I was already typing by hand, packaged so I do not have to remember them and so I cannot accidentally skip one.Why a Python script and not a Notion templateI tried Notion templates. I tried Airtable bases. I tried a Google Doc with section headers. I tried a Trello board. The pattern was the same every time: I built the system, used it twice, and then went back to writing nothing because the system itself was now another decision I had to make.The Python script is a single command (python factory.py --seed "..."). No UI. No template. No choice. It runs the prompts in order and gives me back a file. The point was to remove the meta-decision, not add a new tool to make meta-decisions in.What it actually producesThe first thing I made with the factory was a post about a cron automation stack I had been meaning to write for nine months. The seed was: "why I keep rewriting the same cron jobs". The factory ran, I tweaked two sentences, and the post was on the site in 40 minutes. That was the first time in over a year I had shipped a post in under an hour.That is the actual claim. Not "I made a tool." The claim is: I went from zero posts in 14 months to five posts in a weekend. The tool is just the part I can hand you.What it does not doIt does not write in your voice if you do not give it samples first. The voice prompt needs two or three of your existing posts to anchor the style. If you do not have three posts, you do not have a blog yet, and the factory will not start one for you.It does not publish to your site. The output is a markdown file. You can publish that markdown file anywhere. WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Medium, a static site generator, a plain HTML page, a PDF. The factory does not care.It does not replace editing. The edit pass catches the obvious AI tells. It does not catch the weird sentence only your spouse would notice. You still have to read the draft.Try this firstIf you want to see the factory in action before deciding whether to buy the pack, this post is one of the things I wrote with it. So is the post about [the cron stack and the one about [JSON vs YAML vs TOML. If those read like me, the pack is for you. If they read like every other AI-written post on the internet, the pack is not for you, and I would rather you save your $14.If you do want the pack, it is at [brianackerman.gumroad.com/l/blog-writing-factory. Ten prompts, a 600-word README, a short list of what it does not do. Yours for $14, no subscription.Get the Blog Writing FactoryOne ZIP. Ten prompts. 600-word README. Yours forever. Updates free when I ship new ones.Buy on Gumroad. $14If you would rather build your ownThe factory is not magic. It is five prompts in a file and a 400-line script. If you want to build your own instead of buying mine, here is the order I would run the prompts in:Voice prompt (anchor style from your existing posts)Outline prompt (3-7 sections, each with a one-sentence purpose)Section prompt (one per section, run in sequence, do not parallelize)Edit pass (strip AI slop, kill em-dashes, tighten sentences)Frontmatter generator (title, description, tags, date)Self-review (recommend publish / revise / kill based on the rules in the README)The whole pipeline takes about 4 minutes per post on Claude Sonnet and 7 minutes on GPT-4. The hard part is not the time. The hard part is sitting down to start.That is the part the factory removed for me. Hope it removes it for you too.

Send me the rough edges if you try it. I read every message.