Letting AI Handle My Blog So I Can Focus on Writing

Time is precious, and I don’t want to waste it on tedious work. For my blog, that’s everything that happens after the writing. So I handed that part to AI and kept the part I love: the writing, and the creative work that comes with it. AI is a tool to improve velocity. It is not a replacement for creativity.

When I set out to build the Skip the Escalator website, I wanted something low-cost, easy to maintain, and fully under my control. The solution I went with: I write and track my posts in Notion. Once they’re ready, I tell my AI agent to put them on the site and schedule them in WordPress. This way, I rarely need to log in to WordPress, because the agent handles it.

Why WordPress

Right now, WordPress runs more websites than any other platform. It has a huge community that maintains and shares open-source plugins and themes, and it was originally built for blogs. There’s no need to reinvent that with new technology. It works well for sites like this one. And if you don’t want to build your own design, there are thousands of themes ready to go.

But the real reason I picked it is that I can control it with AI. A WordPress plugin and my hosting company both expose an MCP, which is a standard way for an AI assistant to plug into a tool and take actions in it. That means my assistant can set up the site, write posts into it and schedule them, without me touching the admin screens.

If your site already runs on WordPress like mine, you don’t need to move. You can keep the site you own, save money, and run it with the same AI tools you already use every day.

The real cost was never the writing

Here’s what that tedious part used to look like. I’d log in, paste the post, fix the formatting that broke on the way, think of a title and a description, set the SEO tags, pick a category, schedule it, and then go back and make sure my notes in Notion still matched what was live.

I never timed it, but that was probably one to two hours per post. More than the time, it was the constant context switching, and that kind of busywork wears you down over time. In my case, it meant two places to keep in sync and a dozen small decisions for every post.

If you own a WordPress site, you might already feel this. Maybe you make the edits yourself, or you pay someone to do it. Either way, wrestling with templates, components and plugins can get frustrating. This setup is for people like me who would rather skip the manual work. If you’d rather hire someone, that’s a perfectly good choice too.

What I built

• Hosting: WordPress on Hostinger, on the plan that lets me run as many sites as I want. I paid about $3 a month on a sale. Prices change often, so check Hostinger’s pricing page for current rates.
• Notion: my single source of truth. Drafts, tasks and due dates all live there.
• Claude: my AI assistant. I already pay for it and use it every day for coding, so I wanted the same membership to run the blog too. You could just as easily use Grokbot, Codex or pretty much any other AI agent or harness. Anything that can connect to an MCP works.
• AI Engine: a free WordPress plugin by Meow Apps that exposes an MCP, so Claude can create, update and schedule posts.
• Hostinger MCP: lets Claude set up the hosting and WordPress itself.
• The theme: Plainleaf, a clean, minimal theme I built with Claude Code. I made it open source, so it’s free on GitHub for anyone to use, and WordPress updates it automatically whenever I release a new version.

What a normal week looks like

I write the post in Notion. The ideas and the words are mine. When it’s done, I say something like:

“I finished this blog post in Notion. Can you put it up on the WordPress site and schedule it for the due date on the task?”

Claude reads the post and its task, then handles everything I used to do by hand: the formatting, the title, the description, the SEO tags, and the category, which comes from the content pillar on the task. It sends me a preview link. If I want changes, I edit in Notion and tell it to update the post, so Notion stays the source of truth. When it looks right, it’s scheduled, and I close the task.

I’ve also turned this into a reusable skill, so I can just ask, “Is there anything I need to publish?” and it checks my tasks and due dates for me.

The one job I don’t give the AI

I could have built a proper pipeline from Notion to WordPress, but the problem is formatting: what looks right in Notion doesn’t always come out right in WordPress. So I treated it as a non-deterministic workflow and let the AI handle moving the post, fixing the formatting and the rest of the setup.

But the moment of publishing is different. It’s a deterministic step, so it doesn’t make sense to give it to AI. WordPress already has a scheduler, so I just ask the AI to set the publish date and time to match the task’s due date. After that, there’s no judgment call. Once the schedule is set in WordPress, I know the post will go out on time, and I don’t have to worry about it. So the AI does the busywork, and a deterministic tool presses the button.

Use AI where you need judgment and flexibility, and deterministic tools where things must happen exactly the same way every time.

How much I trust it

• Posts can auto-publish. If something goes out by mistake, I can take it down in a minute. If your content is more sensitive, require approval instead.
• Nothing gets deleted. The AI has no permission to delete posts.
• Hosting changes always need my approval. Once the site is set up, I never auto-approve anything on the hosting side, because that’s where databases live.
• The AI never sees a password or a token. I keep those in a password manager and type them in myself.

Want to build it yourself?

There are two ways in. The easy way needs no code: install Plainleaf, or any theme you like, and connect Claude in the app. The advanced way uses Claude Code to customize Plainleaf or build your own theme, which is what I do. You can grab Plainleaf here: Plainleaf on GitHub.

I’m writing the full walkthrough, from buying hosting to your first post going out, as a step-by-step tutorial. It’s coming next week.