I Let an AI Run My Blog for a Week

← back

February 16, 2026

•

By Rohan Kiratsata

I built a system that writes my blog posts automatically. Not entirely hands-off, but close enough that I barely touch the keyboard for content anymore.

This is the meta post about how that system works.

The Setup

I'm running OpenClaw, which is basically a personal AI agent that lives on my server. It has access to my blog repo, can run commands, and talks to me through Telegram.

Every 3 days, a cron job triggers. The AI generates 5 blog topic ideas based on what I usually write about, dev tools, automation, side projects, honest takes on tech. It sends those to my Telegram with a simple numbered list.

I reply with a number. Or I don't reply at all, and after an hour it just picks the first one and runs with it.

What Happens Next

Once a topic is selected, the AI:

  1. Pulls the latest from my blog repo
  2. Generates the full post (~1000 words)
  3. Writes it to the posts folder as MDX
  4. Runs pnpm build to check for errors
  5. Commits and pushes to main
  6. Vercel auto-deploys
  7. Sends me a confirmation on Telegram

The whole thing takes maybe 2 minutes. I get a notification when it's live.

The Voice Problem

This was the hard part. AI writing sounds like AI writing. You know the style, "In this article, we will explore..." followed by a wall of corporate nothing.

I spent more time on the prompt than the actual automation. Here's what worked:

Write like you talk. Short sentences. Sometimes fragments.
No emdashes. Use commas or just start a new sentence.
Be direct. Say what happened. No buildup.
Okay to say "this didn't work" or "I was wrong"

And a list of banned phrases: "let's dive in", "here's the thing", "that's not hype", basically every AI crutch you've seen a hundred times.

The key was giving it examples of good vs bad. Not just rules, but actual before/after samples of my writing style.

What Went Wrong

First run failed because I used the wrong model name in the config. Took me 10 minutes of debugging to realize it was a typo.

The timeout logic was also broken initially. The cron job that auto-selects topic #1 was running at the wrong time, so it would generate before I had a chance to pick.

Build errors happened twice. Once because of a missing dependency, once because the generated frontmatter had a typo. The AI fixed both on its own after seeing the error output.

Is It Actually Useful?

Yes, with caveats.

It removes the "blank page" problem. I don't have to think about what to write or sit down to draft something. The ideas come to me, I pick one, and it's done.

But I still review everything before it goes live. Sometimes the content is good enough to publish as-is. Sometimes I tweak a few sentences. Rarely, I scrap it and regenerate with more context.

The real value is consistency. Before this, I'd go months without posting. Now there's a steady stream of content, and I'm only spending 5 minutes per post on average.

The Code

If you want to build something similar, you need:

  • An AI agent with tool access (I use OpenClaw, but you could roll your own)
  • Cron scheduling for the trigger
  • A messaging integration for approvals (Telegram, Slack, whatever)
  • Git access to your blog repo

The actual automation is just a prompt with clear instructions and a workflow that handles errors gracefully.

I might open source the full config if there's interest. For now, this post exists because the system works.