Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been publishing the Weekly Thing for nine years and automation is one of the things that has made that possible. I shared a while back how I find content, assemble the issues, and my project structure. Without these well defined workflows there is no way I could continue this project.

The structure I have has worked well but it isn’t autonomous. It only runs when I engage with it. It is also brittle and “one way”. I can only easily run it one time. Additionally I think I could use some help getting things collected and reviewing the in process writing.

To this end I decided to create my support team for the Weekly Thing!

My starting points were:

• Based on Elixir I know that Discord is a reasonable place for an agent to run.
• Based on building Thingy I know that my Weekly Thing archive is a robust knowledge base to build off of.
• Based on sending issues that meander and are just too long sometimes I know an editor would be helpful.
• Based on my own time crunch that I get into when I’m trying to make a whole issue happen in one Saturday morning I know I could use some help making it more iterative.

This is the genesis of my Workshop and the four agent team that I have now created to assist me.

One thing worth being clear about: I have stated many times that “My words are mine!” and not AI’s and that is still the case. I don’t have any of these agents working to write content for me. They are my support team. The words are still mine. The only case where an LLM is “writing” or engaging with anyone is Thingy, the librarian for the Weekly Thing, and the Supporting Membership program where I have an explicit preference that that be a different voice than mine.

Here is the broad outline of the multi-agent solution that allows me to have dedicated agents that focus on different aspects of publishing the newsletter each week. This allows me to focus more on writing and commentary!

Each of these agents are operating with a full set of tools that include the entire archive of the Weekly Thing. As a result they are much more tuned to the job at hand than a generic LLM.

• Eddy is my editor who reviews everything that goes in the newsletter. Eddy assembles a working draft of the current issue of the newsletter every day and then does an editorial review of the content. Eddy shares a status and progress indicator with me in Discord.
• Linky is my researcher who assists with assessing the links I flag to go into the issue. Linky does recon to allow me to filter faster. Linky doesn’t ever look at the current issue and is just assisting with curation. Linky shares these in Discord. I’ve made it so I can reply to Linky with my commentary and it sync’s it back to Pinboard. This has allowed me to turn my commentary into a conversation.
• Marky focuses on the most recent issue of the Weekly Thing that has been published and raising awareness. I’ve done the least with Marky so far, but the goal is to get the Weekly Thing to new readers.
• Patty is the supporting membership manager who helps create call to action to bring new members in and raise money for the nonprofit we have selected. Patty operates on the annual cycle of the membership program and is the only agent that will draft content that does appear (properly sectioned) in the Weekly Thing. Patty understands the goal of the program, the organization that we are focused on this year, and what I have been writing about.

I’m focused mostly on Eddy and Linky right now as they are core to my authoring cycle. I can already see that this is going to allow me to focus on the content more, will be a quality of life improvement to get more incremental content and less scrambling at the end of the publishing cycle, as well as a more readable final email to subscribers.