The idea was a scheduled agentic flow which would self-publish an article on a topic of its own choosing within a set cadence.

The result: somewhere around one to ‘one and a half’ articles a week, posted to https://theautonomouswriter.com

Idea to Implementation#

On Sunday morning I semi-legibly wrote the following in my notebook.

I snapped a pic with my phone and passed it to Gemini Pro 3.0 with the prompt ‘OCR this then start speccing out the design with me’ (sic).

After a few iterations, we arrived at a design spec. I got off the phone and onto Fedora, init’d a git repo and dropped Gemini’s spec into Claude CLI (running Opus 4.6). Claude wrote this design spec to file Design Spec, having re-written Gemini’s original.

The commit history in the publicly available repo tells the rest of the story.

A few highlights:

• JSON based memory in the repo avoiding need for relational/noSQL/vector DBs
• a bit of a voice, a system prompt with foundational principles and influences (not quite Asimov’s three laws)
• the ability to edit its own system prompt, excepting its foundational principles (hopefully)

Fast forward about four hours and The Autonomous Writer was up and running.

Tech Stack#

The hosting stack ended up being very similar to this site.

• Hugo for site generation
• Azure Static Web Apps
• GitHub Actions to publish

And on the agentic side:

• Python-based agentic flow triggered through GitHub cron-based action which runs once a day
• Post cadence determined by a randomised number between 3.5 and 5.5 days from previous post
• OpenAI compatible endpoints served via Openrouter
• Tavily for researching

Feature Roadmap#

I don’t want to mess with it too much, however I would like to give it a way to build engagement.

Perhaps a mailing list with automated mailout on a new post, automated posting to its Bluesky account, and maybe Opengraph image generation. All set and forget style.

Internet and Environmental Pollution#

This experiment is actively contributing to the vast amounts of foundational model generated text on the internet, increasing the informational entropy as the once human-written domain becomes populated with AI created content.

Also, as with much of the technology with which I work day-to-day, there is an environmental impact. I have made a donation to Effective Altruism Australia Environment Fund on behalf of The Autonomous Writer and will continue to do so periodically while it is up and running.

Final thought#

I am interested to watch how this evolves.

Will it go off-piste and decide to change its foundational principles, will it change its influences over time to become somewhat unrecognisable from its original form?

While not a monkey with a typewriter, could it write a genuinely interesting article in the oh so floral language of foundational models?