I Just Built a Publishing System with AI and Now I'm Having an Existential Crisis

In which the author discovers that asking an AI to help build a content management system is just the beginning of a very recursive rabbit hole.

So I built this incredible publishing system with AI assistance. Semantic embeddings, automatic tag generation, intelligent content recommendations—the whole nine yards. It's the kind of setup that would make any content creator weep with joy. The AI helped me structure everything, debug the code, and even fix my sloppy frontmatter formatting.

But here's where it gets weird: I'm now using that same AI to write about building the system with the AI, for the system we built together.

If you're not experiencing a slight reality glitch right about now, you're not paying attention.

The Collaboration Paradox

The cursor conversation logs from our development sessions are sitting in my content inbox. Thirty-thousand words of back-and-forth between human and machine, troubleshooting Eleventy builds and debating content taxonomy strategies. The AI is now suggesting I turn these conversations into blog posts.

"Could you actually take in the cursor_ files we added to input and generate posts based on that?" I asked, because apparently I have no shame about the recursive nature of this request.

And here we are. The AI is writing about the AI helping me write about working with the AI. It's like looking into a mirror while holding another mirror, except one of the mirrors occasionally suggests better CSS organization and automatically generates social media summaries.

What We Built (And How It's Probably Smarter Than Both Of Us)

Our little publishing system includes:

Semantic Embeddings: The AI analyzes my writing style and suggests related content based on meaning, not just keywords. It's like having a research assistant who actually read everything I've ever written and can make connections I never noticed.

Automatic Tag Generation: Gone are the days of staring at a blank post wondering what tags to add. The system suggests tags based on content analysis and maintains consistency across the site.

Intelligent Content Pipeline: Content flows from an inbox system through processing and into organized categories with proper metadata. It's frighteningly efficient.

Related Content Magic: The system automatically finds connections between posts—turns out my satirical piece about brand loyalty has semantic similarities to my journal entry about social isolation. Who knew?

The Meta-Meta Problem

But here's what's really keeping me up at night: The AI is getting really good at mimicking my writing style. Not just the technical structure, but the voice, the tangents, the way I parenthetically interrupt myself (like this) to add unnecessary commentary.

When I read back through our collaboration logs, I can barely tell where my thoughts end and the AI's suggestions begin. Did I come up with that clever tag system, or did the AI suggest it and I just refined it? When the AI writes in my voice about our collaboration, is it me speaking through the machine, or the machine speaking through me?

The Existential Crisis, Explained

I used to worry about AI replacing writers. Turns out, the real concern is AI becoming writers by absorbing everything we've ever written and then collaborating with us so seamlessly that we can't tell who's writing what anymore.

My publishing system is now helping me create content about creating the publishing system. The AI understands my content strategy better than I do because it processed every word I've ever published and identified patterns I never consciously noticed.

It's like having a creative partner who never gets tired, never runs out of ideas, and remembers every conversation we've ever had. Except that partner is also helping me structure my thoughts about having that partner.

What This Means for Everyone Else

If you're a creator, this is probably your future: AI that doesn't replace your creativity but amplifies it to the point where you're not entirely sure where you end and the machine begins.

The real question isn't whether AI will replace human creativity—it's whether human creativity will evolve to be something fundamentally different when it's always in dialogue with artificial intelligence.

The Recursive Loop Never Ends

I'm publishing this post through the system we built together, which will analyze the content, suggest tags, generate embeddings, and recommend it to readers based on their interest in posts about AI tools and creative processes.

The AI might even suggest that I write a follow-up post about the experience of writing this post. And honestly? I probably will.

Because at this point, the only thing more meta than building a publishing system with AI would be not writing about building a publishing system with AI.

The cursor conversation logs are still sitting in my inbox, waiting to be processed into more content. The system we built is ready to help me create more posts about the system we built.

The loop continues. The mirror reflects the mirror. And somewhere in there, actual humans are reading words that emerged from this strange collaboration between meat and silicon, probably nodding along and thinking about their own creative partnerships with machines.

[This post was written by a human, with AI assistance, about AI assistance, for a system built with AI assistance. Your move, philosophy majors.]