Automating the Boring Parts: How I Built an AI-Powered Blog Agent

Why Automate Blog Writing?

As a TPM at Google, I don't have unlimited time to write blog posts. But I do want to consistently share insights about how AI is changing program management. So I did what any engineer-turned-TPM would do: I built a system to help.

This website has an AI agent that runs every Monday morning. It fetches the latest AI news, generates a draft blog post from my perspective, and emails it to me for approval. If I don't respond within 48 hours, it auto-publishes. If I reject it, it's archived and I can edit it later.

The Architecture

The system is surprisingly simple:

1. News Aggregation — RSS feeds from Google AI Blog, TechCrunch AI, MIT Technology Review, and VentureBeat are parsed weekly
2. Content Generation — Gemini 2.0 Flash receives the news summaries plus a detailed system prompt about my voice, background, and preferred topics
3. Human-in-the-Loop — An email with approve/reject buttons gives me editorial control without requiring me to log into a CMS
4. Auto-Publish Safety Net — If I'm busy or traveling, the post still goes out. It's a feature, not a bug — consistency matters more than perfection for a blog.

Related: see Lessons from Scaling a Company to 75 People — And What AI Would Have Changed and The Real AI Bottleneck Isn't the Agents — It's the Wiring Between Them.

What I Learned About AI Content

The raw AI output is about 70% of the way there. It captures the facts and structures them well, but it lacks the specific anecdotes and opinions that make content personal. I typically spend 10-15 minutes editing each draft — adding a real example from my work, adjusting the tone, and cutting the generic parts.

That 15-minute investment is dramatically more efficient than writing from scratch, which would take me 2-3 hours. It's the perfect division of labor: AI handles research and structure, I handle voice and experience.

The goal isn't AI-generated content. It's AI-amplified content — where the ideas are mine but the heavy lifting of research, drafting, and formatting is automated.