Since this is a blog about our collective emerging use of AI and agentic apps, I thought it might be interesting and/or helpful to explain how and when I use AI and don’t in building the blog.

Writing

All of the writing (blog articles, commentary) is me alone. I use agents for dictation, grammar and spell checking. But I write mostly by typing or dictating, and rarely rework. That probably shows.

Why? In a time of proliferating AI driven content, I think it is important for people to know that there is a real human being behind these words.

I’ve long been a fan of the C2PA and plan to certify all of my content as

I use agents in a lot of my professional writing, but not for this blog.

Research

Not using AI for research, at this point, would be just dumb. I use several different agents to both investigate and support the trends and facts I report in my articles. I at least click through to check that the source exists and seems credible to me. I set a high bar for the data-driven, fact-checked standard that the agents use.

News

I use Claude Cowork to find and curate my news pages. Comments from Claude are attributed as such. Where I chime in, it is labelled as me.
I do consume Claude’s appraisal of articles and trends, but rarely
Frankly, Claude is way better at finding this than I am.

Images

I can’t draw. That is how I ended up in programming to begin with. I wanted to be an animator, but I have really terrible spatial intelligence so, I can’t draw.

But I wanted to have images which evoke a certain feel, and which depict visually the theme of each article. So the hero images for each blog post are generated by:

• A script I wrote with Claude pulls the draft article from my notion page
• That script calls Claude to generate an image definition prompt, based on the theme of the article, in keeping with the feel of the site (largely taken from the logo design)
• The image prompt is passed to DALL-E which generates the article.
• The notion page and the synced copy in Sanity are updated with the hero image when I publish

The Logo

The Animacy logo was important to me. I wanted to capture the idea of things becoming more alive, more human facing. The wave is an image of upward change. The gradient goes from cold (machine like) to warm (human). I, well, my digital minions, use the same gradient in images and theming of the website.

The Site

The site is a React Next JS app, written with Claude Code. The blog content is kept in Sanity. Since I am not breaking any new ground, there was no reason not to use what I knew, and what any agent can easily integrate with.

So, yes, Claude does a lot of the coding.