I’ve started publishing monthly newsletters, and the process is mostly automated.

Process

I realized so much of my daily thought and activity is already recorded digitally somewhere: stray thoughts and reflections in my journal; creative project notes; reading notes; movie and TV reviews; really I have a note for everything.

I can point an AI agent at the changes to my notes, month over month, and have it summarize the activity. I set up a script to auto-git-commit any changes in my vault each day, and then a monthly script triggers an AI to look at the cumulative changes. It also checks my Google calendar to try to place any events I mention.

There are lots of little rules and nuances that I figured out by iterating, including which notes and topics to leave out of the newsletter entirely. The process was simple: the agent would write a draft, I’d edit it, and then the agent would look at my edits, make inferences, and register them as rules for next time. We did several turns of this, across three drafts of past months. Going forward, I’ll still edit the drafts myself, but there’ll be less I need to change.

Result

I don’t prefer the AI’s writing style to my own, but it’s good enough for this basic summarization work. I definitely wouldn’t be taking the time to do all of this myself every month, so I’m just happy to be able to share this now. This is a way for me to do more “building in public,” which is important to me as I tend to err on the side of publicly sharing too little, too late.

This was a freebie: my mind was already very much represented in the digital world, with my constant note-keeping which just comes naturally to me, and that made me legible to AI agents, which can organize my content cheaply and quickly.

Newsletters appear on their category page, or on my main page mixed in with everything else.