Building with AI Before Breakfast: substack idea generation at the beautiful Zayed National Museum

Today I'm at the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi and oh my, what a building. If you're anywhere near Abu Dhabi it's worth the trip just for the architecture alone, it's genuinely breathtaking. The exhibitions inside are beautifully done too, just a really polished experience all round. One of those places where the building itself is as much part of the visit as what's inside it.

Thirty articles in today and I hit a wall this week.

Sometimes you just run out of things to write. It’s been a busy week, you’re wiped out, and you just need a little power up. That was me today. I wasn’t sure what topic I wanted to talk about and I also didn’t want to start repeating myself on something I’ve already covered. So I had an idea, what if I could build a tool that surfaces ideas for me but takes into account the stuff I’ve already wrote, so it understands my themes and interests but doesn’t just give me back what I’ve already done.

How It Works

Basically the tool goes and grabs the public RSS feed of my Substack which gives it my recent posts. I come in, pick a category, something like “AI and Finance” for example, tell it how many ideas I want, say 15, and then it goes off and analyses my recent articles.

It reads through them, pulls out the themes and tags, and then generates a list of ideas off the back of what I’ve already wrote. The goal is to get that spark, not a finished article, just something to get the thinking started.

Now the content that gets surfaced is most of the time not bleeding edge ideas. But what it does do is start that spark, which is exactly what I need.

So from that list of 15 ideas I can go through and be like okay that’s interesting, that’s interesting, that’s interesting, pick two to four of them and drop them into the next stage. Here I can tweak things, remove bits I’m not really bothered about, and then generate an outline for each one.

It basically gives me a bullet point overview of each potential article with a hook, some context, key insights, just some talking points I can reference.

Then there’s a third step where I can take my final idea and check it against my existing posts. So if I’m thinking “this seems a bit similar to something I think I’ve wrote before” I can run it through and it’ll analyse the existing content and tell me whether there’s any meaningful overlap or if it’s good to go.

A Few Limitations

The RSS feed only pulls back the last 20 posts not the full archive, but that’s okay for now. And from there I’ve got the option to download everything as markdown so I can store it in my notes or a similar app and basically it gets me set up with an idea ready to follow my normal workflow. Which is to then discuss the concept with ChatGPT voice mode while I’m driving, have a conversation to flesh out the thinking, and then write out the first draft over some lovely café breakfast.

Why Not Just Get AI to Write the Whole Thing?

The obvious question would be could you not then just get AI to write the post and automate the whole thing. And in theory yes, but then where’s the post? Writing for me is a self learning process. So enhancing the spark is the bit I need, not replacing it.

Want to Try It?

Unfortunately no access to this tool at the moment as it consumes tokens, but if anyone wants to try it then just ping me and I can share a link to test.