The stuff I'd tell you over coffee — short, useful, no fluff. Playbooks, notes and clips on building AI content systems that stay honest.
PlaybookThis week
5 tells that your AI content is quietly lying
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01 — Confident, no source
If it states a number or a name with total confidence and can't point to where it came from, treat it as fiction until proven otherwise.
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02 — Rounded everything
Real data is messy. Suspiciously clean stats (‘over 10,000 users’, ‘3x growth’) are usually the model reaching for a plausible shape.
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03 — Timeless voice
It reads like it could've been written any year. Real editorial has a now to it — a reference, a tension, a point of view.
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04 — Every brand sounds the same
Drop the logo and you can't tell whose it is. That's drift. A voice spec is the fix, not more prompting.
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05 — No one would disagree
If a take is safe enough that literally nobody would push back, it isn't a take. Ship a point of view or don't ship.
Note3 days ago
The 2-minute brand voice test
Paste three paragraphs of your best writing and three of your worst into a doc. The delta between them — not the average — is your actual voice. Spec the delta.
2:14Clip preview · add real media
Watch5 days ago
Making AI video look like a phone at 2am, not a movie trailer
Principle
If a system can't show where a fact came from, it doesn't get to publish it.
1 week ago
Field data1 week ago0hallucinated venue fields, across 5 cities
Every claim traces to a fetched source. The verification spine is the product — the content is the by-product.
Template2 weeks ago
The carousel structure I use for every post
Hook that names a tension → three slides that pay it off → one slide that reframes → a close that earns the follow. Nine slides, never ten.
Get the structure
Note2 weeks ago
Stop prompting for ‘engaging’
‘Engaging’, ‘compelling’, ‘punchy’ are noise words a model averages into mush. Give it a constraint instead: one idea, 40 words, no adjectives. Constraints read as voice.
Playbook3 weeks ago
How to make one content engine serve two brands
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01 — Separate the spec from the system
The pipeline is the constant. Voice, palette, pillars and gates are the variables. If they're tangled, you built a one-off.
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02 — Re-skin, don't rebuild
A second brand should take a fraction of the time. If it doesn't, the first build wasn't really an architecture.
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03 — Gates travel, taste doesn't
Verification rules port cleanly. Editorial taste has to be re-specced per brand — that's the part worth your actual attention.
1:31Clip preview · add real media
Watch3 weeks ago
A 90-second teardown of a post that looks AI and how to fix it
Principle
Finished beats clever. Ship what someone can post, not a draft they have to fix.