What I've Been Working On

A few months ago, I took a break from writing and publishing. That break was originally intended just to be for The Writing Cooperative, but it's extended into my writing as well. In fact, this is the first real thing I've written since February. Wild.

I think I was more burnt out than I realized.

Instead of writing, I spent the last few months working on some of the behind the scenes things I've always wanted to do but never had the time (or skill). This is a post about how I've been using AI to build out my writing infrastructure.

I still believe that AI is not an all or nothing choice — we can use AI to enhance our workflows or help us develop things we otherwise could not. That's what I'm sharing here.

My writing begins on my phone, like it always does, but goes into one of two different directions:

1. Blog Posts (like this one)
2. Reviews

I have a Siri Shortcut that structures the initial template. It asks what I'm writing and then guides me through prompts to develop the framework. This part isn't new, I've been using a version of this Shortcut for years. It outputs blog posts as a markdown file in iA Writer, so I can develop it from there.

What's new is the Reviews engine. I've been capturing movie and TV reviews for years in markdown via a different Shortcut. These were saved to my local drive originally in Day One Journal and then in Obsidian as a way to wander through my past tastes and thoughts. What Claude Code helped me do was bring this stack together.

Now, the review shortcut captures the title and my review and, through the magic of APIs and connected services, pulls details about the title and then creates a post live on my website. I'm now capturing movies, TV shows, and books. Through the power of Claude Code's scriptwriting, I also managed to pull a few years worth of local reviews and convert them to posts on my site.

The whole thing is seamless and works without further intervention from AI. The scripts live as Cloudflare Workers and GitHub Actions, which means the whole process runs for free.

For my blog posts, I had Claude write a script to auto analyze and tag articles according to its content. I've always been terrible at figuring out what tags to use and what to avoid, so now the system does it for me.

99% of the tags on my site are what Ghost calls intenral tags — in other words, these are tags you the reader won't see, but provide the connective tissue for everything behind the scenes. As a result, this should lead to better recommended reads at the bottom of every post and a more powerful search engine.

Next in the tech stack, I've had Claude set up another set of scripts that then takes new posts on my site and, depending on what they are, post them to Mastodon and Bluesky. This part cut Zapier (and it's $20/month cost) out of my workflow.

Finally, an additional set of scripts archives the post as markdown into a private GitHub repository so I have a full backup, beyond what Ghost and Magic Pages already captures. This Writing repo replaced the original reviews from Obsidian.

I expanded the Writing repo to also include my journaling, random thoughts, recipes, and more. As a result, all of my writing is now in one place and not scattered across multiple apps, folders, and platforms. It all lives in a private repo on GitHub with a local version in iCloud so I can access it from any device.

Not only does this new tech stack impact my archives, but it lets me further develop my website into a true hub on the web. The one-stop-shop for everything Justin Cox related, so to speak. The beauty of platform independence is building what you want, not sticking with a preset sandbox decided by someone else.

With the support from agentic coding tools like Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, those of us who have just a moderate understanding of web technologies can build a complete platform-independent writing workflow and archive. It's been a dream for years and now it's a true reality.

Now that the scaffolding is gone and my writing structure is more or less where I want it, hopefully you'll see more posts from me again. I'm still not ready to dive back into editing The Writing Cooperative, but I think the writing itch is coming back.

Stay tuned.