“I built some tooling that created writing starters in my blog folder to kickstart my thoughts and hopefully get me writing again.” (my morning pages, 2026-09-30)

I have a blog, which means that I need to write. This seems obvious but sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle of daily life. Over the last 5 months it hasn’t been sometimes. It’s been constant. I haven’t written.

Sure, I made great strides early in the year to make content and I’ve written quite a bit. But that was a thing of the past and, if I’m honest, I do miss it.

Sitting down to write, on the other hand, is something I have avoided. That is something I’m working to change.

To support this habit change, I’ve created some AI tooling to help get my thoughts started and my fingers tapping away at the keyboard.

What I built

I vibe-coded some tooling that will go through my vaults and look for ideas, tensions, and other topics that it thinks are interesting and puts together a writing prompt for me. It’s the bare bones of a post. It runs weekly, looking at new things that I’ve been building, reading, or that have turned up as seeds in my vault.

Where it fell flat

So the other day I sat down, excited to try this new tool out. I opened up my Obsidian vault and navigated to the folder. I eagerly opened up the first idea, a starter built from an article I’d read. It was pretty bad. Like the idea wasn’t awful and a great writer could have turned it into something worth reading.

Right now, I’m trying to find a writing flow and I wouldn’t say I’m a great writer. So I wasn’t feeling it. Which is fine.

I moved on to the next one. How good are LLMs at decision forking?. This one was lost on me. I could probably dig in to it and figure something out, but looking at the topic, I just heard crickets between my ears.

Flipping through the remaining writing starters got roughly the same response from me. No interest, nothing clicked.

Did I really try?

The short answer is no. I admit I didn’t really try. But, in my defense, these were not the prompts that I was looking for. They weren’t something I could pick up and run with. They weren’t things that I could just start a meaningful discussion about.

Is it an excuse? Sure.

Right now, I want the easy win. Something that I can sit down and finish. Something that just flows out, and this wasn’t it.

Wanting it to matter

There’s another half to the story. I decided instead that morning to begin writing “morning pages”, just random thoughts that are in my head early in the morning. It was the first time I’d written anything in five months, and it was a small win. I didn’t write much, but I wrote about how I wanted to get started and wasn’t able to work with any of the prompts. Then I went back to Claude and told it about my issues with the tooling and that I wrote morning pages instead.

It updated the prompt tooling to include starters based on my morning pages.

That’s the difference, I think. The starters built from things I’d read were someone else’s ideas handed back to me. The one built from my morning pages was already mine.

… and here I am. Writing my first post in quite a while. That is something that matters… to me. Hopefully, it will lead to something that matters for you too.