Part 7: Let AI Fill the Draft Tray

A site like Digital Den lives or dies on fresh content. In mid-September I set out to build a reusable prompt that drafts a daily article, and a second one that pulls together a top-5 tech news list. Both land in Sanity as drafts for me to review. Nothing goes live on its own.

Deciding who we're writing for

Before any prompt was written, I had to answer the same question as in Part 1: who is this for? The answer came straight from the old Digital Den store. The site's voice is plain language for readers with little tech background, the same people who used to walk in asking why their email stopped working.

I set four topic pillars, weighted by how often each should come up: everyday troubleshooting like email, Wi-Fi and phone settings (about 40 percent), privacy and security basics (30 percent), operating system and app upgrade explainers (20 percent), and myth-busting (10 percent). If I leave the topic blank, the prompt picks one from that rotation. News categories became defaults that I can override on any given day. I also chose to keep it as a saved prompt I paste in, rather than packaging it as a formal Skill, at least for now.

What went wrong

The first run couldn't find my Sanity project at all. The connector had signed in with a different login method than the one that owns the project, so as far as Sanity knew, I had no projects. Reconnecting with the right login fixed it, and a test article about Wi-Fi landed as a draft.

Hero images were getting cropped badly, because the image slot on the article page is about 2.15 times wider than it is tall. I decided to source those images myself at 1800 by 840 pixels, which fits the slot cleanly.

Testing creates clutter, so we added a bulk-delete tool to Studio, and at my request a "date created" column to go with it. The tool didn't offer that column, so Claude Code copied the tool's open-source code into my project and added it there, rather than editing the installed package, which would have been wiped out on the next update.

The human on the publish button

Here's my favorite part of the design. The article's cover image is a required field, and the prompt never fills it in. That means no AI-drafted article can be published until I've read it, added an image and pressed publish myself. The missing image is a built-in checkpoint.

The lesson

Let AI fill the draft tray, but keep a human on the publish button. A required field the AI never fills is a simple way to make sure nothing goes live without you.

Try it yourself

If you want AI help with regular content, write down your reader, your voice and your topic mix first, and put them in the prompt. Then build in one step that only a human can do before anything is published.

Next time: building a community discussion board, starting by studying someone else's mistakes.