¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

I’ve been drawing a line for ages here. My AI usage policy, quoting Derek Sivers:

I have never ever used AI to generate text in place of my “voice”. […] nothing claiming to be written by me is written by an AI.

Likewise, I said. Then in “new blog post via Claude Code” I held the line one more time: the LLM orchestrates the publishing, but “everything is still my own text, my own words. The LLM is not writing the prose.”

The line moved. Slightly. I wrote a /bloggify skill whose entire job is to draft a post in my own style / voice:

---
name: bloggify
description: Draft a blog post for perrotta.dev in the existing house style.
argument-hint: "<topic or what you want to write about>"
---

Write a blog post about `$ARGUMENTS` for the perrotta.dev blog.

The trick is that the style is already written down. The repo has a STYLE.md — derived by reading my own old posts — and the skill just points at it:

The repo owns the style. Read STYLE.md and CLAUDE.md first — they are the source of truth for voice, structure, frontmatter, and conventions.

It scaffolds with just new, follows the rules I’d already codified (minimal frontmatter, bold problem statement, code carries the weight, no “In this post I will…”), lints with prek, and hands back a draft. It does not commit.

So: is this still my own words?

Mostly. The skill forbids invented examples — it has to use real commands, real output, the real artifact. The structure is mine, written down a year ago. The voice is mine, learned from my old posts. The prose is the machine’s impression of me, and I edit it until it sounds like me again.

The line didn’t disappear. It just got blurrier.

I (still) commit to reading the entire post, paragraph by paragraph, and making manual changes to it to better match my style.

As of today, it’s not clear to me whether this approach will stick.

🤖 Drafted with /bloggify.