This feed now writes itself: the $0 autonomous content engine

The story of the system that now runs this feed, built in a day, for zero dollars a month.

What happened

As of this week, the blog you are reading publishes itself. Every morning at 10:30, a scheduled Claude agent reads 31 curated sources across AI, automation, and CRM. It drafts the day's posts in my voice, verifies that every cited link actually resolves, and grounds every claim in the article it came from. The posts land on this site immediately and roll out to LinkedIn through the afternoon, spaced hours apart so the feed algorithm and my audience are treated with respect.

The control panel is a Google Sheet. Not a dashboard I built to look impressive: a real spreadsheet with approval gates, kill switches, tone dials, posting windows, and per-post view and like tracking. A daily 1 PM email tells me what was drafted, what is queued, and what published. On a normal day, reading that email is my entire involvement.

The stack is deliberately boring: a LinkedIn developer app with OAuth so no third party ever touches my account, Google Apps Script as the free always-on server, a scheduled Claude agent as the writer, and this Next.js site on Vercel pulling posts live from the sheet. There is no paid API, no hosted automation platform, no subscription. Zero dollars a month.

My take

The interesting part is not that this is possible. RSS-to-AI-to-LinkedIn templates are everywhere, and posting tools charge $50 to $100 a month for less. The interesting part is what changes when the system is yours: you own the keys, you own the website the content lives on, you set the quality bar (mine refuses to publish a claim it did not read in a source), and the running cost rounds to zero.

That is the same principle I apply to every client build. The best automation is not the flashiest one. It is the one that runs quietly on infrastructure you control, does one job completely, and lets a human steer from something as familiar as a spreadsheet.

If a system like this could keep your business visible while you do the actual work, that conversation is exactly what I am for.