Part 12: Map the Pipeline Before You Automate It

With a daily article landing in Sanity, the obvious next question on October 1 was: could each new article or video post itself to Facebook, X, Instagram and maybe LinkedIn? Each post would carry an image, a short summary, a link back to the Den and an invitation to support the site. I said up front that I wasn't ready to decide anything. I just wanted to understand the options.

Flowchart first

Instead of jumping to a tool, Claude laid out the whole pipeline as six stages: something triggers a post, the post gets drafted, an image is attached, a person approves it, it's published, and the results get measured. Seeing it that way made clear that "automating social media" is really six smaller decisions, and I don't have to automate all of them at once.

It also fits a pattern from earlier in this series. Claude suggested a "social post" draft type in Sanity, so posts would wait for my review just like the daily articles in Part 7. The approval step stays human.

Three ways to publish

For the publishing stage, there were three tiers to choose from. A scheduling service like Buffer is the simplest. A no-code automation tool like Make or Zapier offers more control. Connecting directly to each social platform gives the most control and the most work. None of these is decided yet, and that's on purpose.

The lesson

Map the whole pipeline before you automate any one step. It's the same discipline as flowcharting a batch run before you code it.

Try it yourself

When you want to automate something, start by telling the AI you're not ready to decide and ask it to map every stage from start to finish. Then pick the one stage that would save you the most time and automate only that.

Next time: asking one AI to check another AI's work.