The Obituary Was Premature
There's a popular take right now that AI has killed content creation. That blogs are dead. That everything from here forward is recycled slop — a machine regurgitating the internet back at itself.
I've been using Claude Code daily for about a month now. And I've come to the opposite conclusion.
Content creation isn't dead. It's been restructured. The human hasn't been removed from the process — they've been promoted.
What Actually Changed
Before AI tooling, creating a blog post meant:
- Having the idea.
- Writing every word.
- Formatting the markup.
- Fighting with frontmatter, slugs, RSS feeds, and index files.
- Proofreading, editing, restructuring.
- Publishing.
Steps 2 through 5 are where most people quit. Not because they lacked insight — because the labor of expression was too high. The Admin Tax on publishing a single thought was brutal.
Now? I brainstorm. I talk through the idea. I shape the argument. The agent handles the scaffolding — the HTML, the metadata, the feed updates, the file creation. I'm still the one deciding what gets said and why. I'm just not hand-coding every <p> tag to say it.
The "AI Slop" Argument
Some people will look at this workflow and call the output AI slop. I understand the impulse. There is a flood of zero-effort, zero-thought, fully-generated content out there. SEO farms running prompts through GPT and publishing the raw output with no human fingerprint at all.
That is slop. I won't argue otherwise.
But there's a distinction that matters: who is driving?
If the human provides the prompt and walks away, that's generation. If the human provides the insight, shapes the argument, iterates on the structure, and uses the AI as a writing partner — that's co-creation. The difference isn't whether AI touched the words. It's whether a human touched the thinking.
The Co-Creative Process
Here is what my actual workflow looks like now:
- I notice a pattern, have an experience, or form an opinion worth articulating.
- I talk through it — sometimes out loud, sometimes in a rough prompt.
- The agent drafts a structure. I reshape it. Cut what's hollow. Sharpen what's dull.
- The result is something neither of us would have produced alone.
That last point is the one people miss. I wouldn't have written this post without the tool — not because I couldn't, but because the friction would have stopped me. The idea would have stayed in my head, half-formed, competing with forty other priorities for the energy it takes to sit down and write 800 words of clean HTML.
The AI didn't replace my voice. It removed the barrier between my thinking and the published page.
Scale Without Dilution
The real unlock isn't just speed. It's volume without compromise.
Before this, I could maybe publish one post a week if I forced myself. Now I publish when I have something to say — which turns out to be far more often than I had bandwidth to express.
The bottleneck was never ideas. It was always the overhead of turning an idea into a finished artifact. Remove that overhead, and the throughput of original thought goes up — not down.
This is the opposite of what the "AI kills creativity" crowd predicts. They assume more AI means less human. In practice, more AI means more human output — because the human was always the bottleneck at the wrong stage.
Who This Threatens
This model threatens people whose value was in the labor of writing, not the quality of thinking. If your edge was that you could grind out 2,000 words faster than the next person, yes — that advantage is gone.
But if your edge is that you see things others don't? That you connect patterns across domains? That you have lived experience worth articulating? Then these tools are pure leverage. You were always the bottleneck. Now you're not.
The Protocol: The question was never "Did AI write this?" The question is "Did a human think this?" If the answer is yes, the tool used to express it is irrelevant. The insight is the product. Everything else is formatting.
