TL;DR
- The bottleneck isn't orchestration — it's content quality
- The real question: how much control do you need over prompts and style?
- Tools range from fully-managed to build-it-yourself — pick based on how much you want to tune voice
- Human-in-the-loop (Slack review) is the gate that prevents AI slop from going live
- ~$50/month vs. 120 hours of manual work
🔗 Clone my proof-of-concept: Content automation template
What I've Learned
Most people worry about orchestration — scheduling, APIs, multi-platform posting.
That's solved. Most automation tools handle it well.
The actual bottleneck is generating content that doesn't sound like AI.
The spectrum of control matters more than the specific tool. Some platforms handle more for you — configure settings, trust the output. Others expose prompts and let you tune style over time. Build-it-yourself gives full control but requires engineering work.
This space is evolving quickly. Evaluate tools based on how much prompt visibility and workflow control they offer today.
The decision comes down to one question: how much do you want to control how your writing style evolves?
If delegating style decisions to the platform works for you, go black-box. If you want to continuously refine how AI matches your voice, you need something that exposes the prompts.
Human-in-the-loop is non-negotiable for quality. A dedicated Slack channel for content review — approve, reject, or give feedback — creates the gate that prevents AI slop from publishing. That feedback can flow back to refine future content, creating a loop that improves over time.
Platform-specific quirks matter. LinkedIn and X can auto-publish with rate limits. Reddit requires an intermediary — most publishing tools don't support it natively, and Lindy's Reddit integration only handles searching/reading. Route through Buffer or Zapier via HTTP request to post to subreddits.
When evaluating tools, check whether they support approval gates, scheduling with human review, and feedback loops. This space is moving fast — capabilities that were missing a few months ago may exist now.
Timestamps
- 0:00 — Jeffrey's question about content automation
- 1:00 — Why content quality is the real bottleneck
- 2:00 — Lindy proof-of-concept walkthrough
- 3:00 — Setting up the content generation agent
- 5:00 — Slack human-in-the-loop approval workflow
- 6:00 — RSS feeds and Airtable for curated examples
- 10:00 — Writing style is the hardest part
- 13:00 — Key takeaway: orchestration easy, quality hard
Tools & Resources
- Lindy.ai — workflow automation with prompt visibility ($49.99/month) — clone my POC template
- Zapier / Make.com / N8N / String — orchestration platforms (check current content features)
- Blaze, Lex, YouDistro, Spiral — AI writing tools (evolving quickly — evaluate current capabilities)
- Claude Sonnet — handles nuance well for content generation
- "How to Make AI Write Less Like AI" by Every — good article, and are among my favorite AI thinkers
- Slack
#content-reviewchannel — human-in-the-loop approval workflow - Style guide template — explicit tone, POV, structure rules for your prompts