I have had this blog for over a decade. If you scroll far enough back you will find Portuguese posts about Objective-C and cocos2d from 2010, a scatter of notes through the years, and then long, quiet gaps. The kind of gaps where you tell yourself you will write something next week, and next week never shows up. The blog was not dead. It was just asleep, and I had mostly made peace with that.

Then this year it woke up. In the last few weeks I have shipped more posts than in the previous three years combined. The thing that changed was not discipline or a new year resolution. It was figuring out how to use AI to remove the parts of writing that kept stopping me.

What actually kept me from writing

It was never the ideas. I always had things I wanted to write about: a homelab fix, a transcoding tweak, a tmux habit, something I learned the hard way. The ideas pile up. What I did not have was the runway between “I know this” and “this is a finished post someone can read.”

That runway is full of small frictions. Staring at a blank file. Deciding how to structure something I understand in my head but have never put in order. Second-guessing whether my English reads cleanly, since it is not my first language. Doing the boring last mile of fixing a code block, checking a command, tidying a front matter block. None of these are hard. All of them are enough to make me close the tab and do something else.

A finished post was never one big task. It was twenty tiny ones, and any of them could be the one that made me quit for the night.

If you read my old posts you can see this plainly. They are full of grammar mistakes and misspellings, the kind that slip past you when English is not your first language. I would publish something, then notice a typo days later and go back to fix it, then notice another one, and another. It was a slow drip of small corrections, and honestly it was frustrating. Not enough to make me stop, but enough to take some of the joy out of hitting publish.

Where AI fits, and where it does not

The trap is to think AI writes the post for you. It does not, and you do not want it to. A post that is fully generated reads like nobody was home, and the whole point of a personal blog is that someone is home. The voice is the value.

So I do not ask it to write. I ask it to clear the runway.

I talk through an idea out loud and have it pull the shape out of my rambling, so I start from an outline instead of an empty file. I write the ugly first draft myself, in my own words, and then ask where it drags or where I left a gap a reader would trip on. I lean on it to catch the grammar mistakes I will always make as a non-native speaker, without letting it sand my sentences into the same smooth paste every AI tool reaches for. I have it sanity check a command or a code block before I publish something wrong. And when a post is done, I lean on the workflow I already wrote about, where a scheduled agent handles the mechanical parts of getting words from my head to the site.

The judgment stays with me. What to write, what I actually think, which opinions are mine to defend. AI just removes the friction between me and that judgment. Same trick I use for everything else: automate the gathering and the drafting, keep the thinking.

Keeping it sounding like me

This only works if the output still sounds like a person, and left alone these tools do not. They reach for em dashes, for “in summary”, for the same three transition words, for a confident flatness that belongs to no one. So I push the opposite into every prompt. Write plainly. No em dashes. Short words over long ones. If a sentence sounds like a press release, cut it.

I also read every line before it ships. If a paragraph does not sound like something I would actually say out loud, it does not go in. That is the real filter. The AI can hand me ten versions of a sentence, but I am the one who knows which one is mine.

Was it worth it

The honest measure is not quality, it is volume of finished work. Posts that used to die at eighty percent now cross the line. The backlog of “I should write that down” is finally shrinking instead of growing. And the posts still sound like me, because the part that is me is the part I never handed off.

If you have a blog asleep somewhere, this is the unglamorous advice: do not ask AI to write for you. Ask it to remove whatever specific thing keeps stopping you. For me that was the blank page, the structure, and the grammar I was self-conscious about. Once those were gone, it turned out I had plenty to say.

The blog is awake again. Let us see how long I can keep it that way.

This post was written with the help of AI (Claude by Anthropic).