Introducing the Content Machine!
This was the first time I walked through the mechanics of our anti-slop content system & how we drive 10,000,000+ impressions at
@tenex_labs with a marketing team of...2.
Thanks to
@clairevo for having me on her show to share.
Full-writeup & interview below...
What is the Content Machine?
A directory of daisy-chained skills that turn what you already say into publish-ready content. This is the key way to avoid turning into a slop cannon.
It mines the places you already talk (Slack, Notion, Gmail, Linear, GitHub) plus what the internet is saying, finds the ideas worth writing, interviews you to extract the story, drafts it, and edits it to a 9/10 bar before you post.
What are the principles of this system?
1) It is not a "write me a post" prompt. The core belief baked into it: the raw material must come from you.
2) The machine never invents your voice and never fabricates your insight. It does the research, the structure, and the editing, so your time goes only to the part only you can do. It focuses the human on the first & final mile of the content process.
How is it structured?
A two-layer split between the process & the person
- The process layer is generic and shared: the pipeline, the content-type specs, the copywriting references, the onboarding flow. That is what lives in git and what gets shipped to other people.
- The personal layer is yours and never leaves your machine: content-machine.config.md, creators/
/ (profile, style guide, lessons), projects/, published/, oracle-reports/. All gitignored, and the desktop build script refuses to package any of it.
What is the 10-step pipeline?
1) Creator Select. Multi-creator by design. It figures out who this run is for and loads their profile, style guide, and content lessons. Everything downstream is scoped to that person.
- Onboarding (first run only). Scaffolds the workspace, auto-creates your Notion Vault, connects your sources, and builds your voice guide one of three ways: import a guide you already have, feed it writing samples, or sit for a short voice interview.
2) The Oracle. Two idea engines running in parallel:
- Oracle scans what you wrote in the last 7 days across Slack, Notion, Gmail, Linear, and Git, hunting for "spikes," moments where you naturally said something worth expanding.
- The Internet Reader scans what the world is saying, pulled only from the source list in your profile (handles, labs, outlets, keyword watchlist), plus a social sweep across Reddit, X, YouTube, Hacker News, and more (thanks /last30days & @mvanhorn).
- Every idea is scored 0 to 10 (POV strength 25%, story potential 25%, emotional intensity 20%, lesson/framework 20%, depth 10%). Everything qualifying gets written to The Vault, a Notion database that is the durable idea bank.
2.5) Research. Before you get interviewed, a research agent builds a sourced brief:
- key facts with links
- current developments
- what has already been said in-market
- contrarian angles
- open questions only you can answer.
3) Interview Panel.
Six interviewer personas (Ferriss, Rogan, Larry King, Stern, Barbaro, Barbara Walters) ask you one question at a time, each chasing a different dimension: tactics, story, core truth, the hidden thing, clarity, emotional depth.
It pushes back on vague answers and will not advance until it has 2 to 3 specific stories with real details.
4) Production. Your interview becomes a raw markdown file: stories, core insights, quotable moments, the emotional anchor, surprising reveals, the "so what." Your exact words are preserved. This file is the source of truth for everything that follows.
5) Refinement. Now it drafts, and only now. It must read your style guide, your content lessons, and the spec for the chosen format (LinkedIn post, X thread, long post, playbook, podcast promo, reaction post, article, and so on).
6) Writer's Council. Six reviewers score the draft:
Morgan Housel (will this matter in 10 years), Tim Urban (is it confusing), Shaan Puri (would I stop scrolling, plus three alternate hooks), Greg Isenberg (what can someone steal), David Perell (is it personal, observational, playful), and a Slop Detector hunting AI tells.
Each gives what's working, what needs work, a fix, and a score.
7) Revision Loop. Under 9/10 goes back around.
The smart part: fixes get sorted into editorial (the machine rewrites it itself) and information gaps (only you have the answer), and information gaps route back to the Interview Panel with targeted questions rather than letting the machine make something up.
Max 3 editorial cycles. At 9/10 the piece becomes the anchor.
8) Repurposing Engine. One anchor fans out into 10+ derivatives: X article, LinkedIn article, short X posts, short LinkedIn posts, a playbook if there is a framework in it.
Each one is written native to its platform with a fresh hook, not cross-posted, and each runs the full council and revision loop to 9/10 on its own. This is the multiplier.
9) Distribution (optional, off by default). UTM tagging, a scheduled publishing queue, CRM capture of every touchpoint, attribution reporting back to pipeline, and marking the Vault row as Published.
10) The Learning Loop, always running.
After you approve a piece it diffs your first draft against the final, extracts the pattern, and asks you to confirm it.
Confirmed lessons go into content-lessons.md and override the style guide. Once a lesson proves out across a few projects it graduates into the style guide itself.
Your first drafts get better over time instead of you re-explaining preferences.
P.S. i'm thinking about opensourcing this. should i do it?