📰 Story

Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a quite a lot of work done in a single shot. First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email. I generate the newsletter with my blog-to-newsletter tool - an HTML and JavaScript app that fetches my latest content from this Datasette instance and formats it as rich text HTML, which I can then copy to my clipboard and paste into the Substack editor. Here's a detailed explanation of how that works . I recently added a new type of content to my blog to capture content that I post elsewhere, which I called "beats". These include things like releases of my open source projects, new tools that I've built, museums that I've visited (from niche-museums.com ) and other external content. I wanted to include these in the generated newsletter. Here's the prompt I ran against the simonw/tools repository that hosts my blog-to-newsletter tool, using Claude Code on the web . Clone simonw/simonwillisonblog from github to /tmp for reference Update blog-to-newsletter.html to include beats that have descriptions - similar to how the Atom everything feed on the blog works Run it with python -m http.server and use `uvx rodney --help` to test it - compare what shows up in the newsletter with what's on the homepage of https://simonw