What AI Found Hiding in 74 Posts I Never Planned

If you create for a living, the AI conversation usually arrives as a threat. Will it write your stuff? Will it sand your voice down into the same gray paste the rest of the internet is publishing?

That's not the AI I want to talk about today.

I didn't publish anything for the last few days, because I was busy putting AI to work on my own site — on the boring stuff. The stuff that never goes near my voice, and that I'd never have made the time to do by hand.

When you read about people using AI on their website, they're usually talking about new designs or new features that AI programmed for them. I wasn't doing either of those things. My use of AI was more boring but much more helpful. And I thought I'd walk you through it.

Where I draw the line with AI

As I've mentioned before, I craft my own articles, my own takes, and my own structures. I use AI on every post — but much like I'd think about spell checkers or grammar functions. To tighten things up, clean them up, or catch errors on my part.

But AI can do so much more than that.

Why all 74 of my posts said the same thing

I started the new year publishing every other day. This post is number 75 this year on how I'm experiencing and using AI. The other 74 were all tagged, simply, with one word: "AI."

I wasn't trying to define my topics or detail my audiences too quickly — because I didn't know in advance what I'd be writing about, or who I'd be writing for. I wrote what was interesting to me.

I know my approach isn't the best when it comes to SEO. But I've honestly never cared. I write for myself first (to process, and to figure out what I think), and for you second. I don't think too much about Google. It's not even in third place.

And that's exactly what made the last couple of days a great time to put AI to work on something it's really good at: pattern matching.

What I actually asked AI to do

Here's what I did, and how I put AI to work:

1. I asked it to pull down all my "AI"-tagged articles (74) and save them as markdown (though it could just as easily have been HTML).
2. I asked it to spin up sub agents and read every single article, to produce a large index of all the material I'd covered.
3. I asked it to then determine, from the total corpus, the topics this collection actually covered.
4. I asked it to define, from the content itself, the segments of people each piece was written for.
5. And last, I wanted it to build the full map of all that — so we could tag every article with a sub-topic and a target audience — and to add the cross-linking data that was missing. I wanted to go back and link posts together in intelligent ways that couldn't have been done at the start, when I didn't yet know what I'd be writing.

All of this is the bread and butter of what AI can do, and do well.

What changed on the site today

Visit the site today and roll over the blog menu in the header. You'll see a dropdown of audience segments — for engineers, for executives, for founders, for consultants, for creators. Click any of those, or the blog menu itself, and on the left sidebar you'll find more than just "AI" in the filtering options. You'll see a set of categories that didn't exist last week: encoding expertise, AI adoption, agentic software, vibe coding, and more.

This is the behind-the-scenes work that's fast and easy for AI and much harder and slower for us to do ourselves — especially when we're too close to our own creation to see its shape.

Once I had that final map, the rest was easy. I gave Claude access to the MCP connection to my website and had it make all the changes: adding tags, adding links, adding menu items.

The part worth stealing

Here's the lesson if you're a creator. I didn't need a content strategy to start. I needed to start.

The strategy was hiding inside the work the whole time. I just couldn't see it until there was enough of it — and until I had something that could read all 74 posts at once, without getting tired or precious about any of them.

So if you've been stalling because you haven't figured out your topics, or nailed down your audience, or built the perfect content calendar — write the next thing. Then write the one after that. The map shows up once there's territory to map.

And the timing works out, too. As we head into the second half of the year, that clarity on topics and audiences is exactly what lets someone like me plan a real content calendar.

You can see what mine looks like now at chrislema.com.