I Don't Fear AI Slop. I Fear Untold Stories - Zack Proser, WorkOS
Key Takeaway
Building automated production factories infused with personal craft and domain expertise enables colleagues and children to share untold stories with asymmetric leverage.
Highlights
A self-published technical blog post about personal experience was written entirely from scratch into markdown in 23 minutes.
An initial automated cloud-based tool called blog bot was built on Cloudflare to increase publishing velocity across multiple teams at WorkOS.
Colleagues interact with the blog bot through Slack to automatically source event transcripts, recordings, and images into an 85 to 90 percent complete draft.
A custom bedtime story application built for two toddlers using Opus 5.5 extra high was successfully play-tested from zero to working in four hours.
Timeline
The Fear of Untold Stories Over AI Slop
Continuous writing habits and frequent publishing cycles establish personal baseline standards for artifact creation. Rather than worrying about low-quality automated output, attention shifts toward empowering individuals who struggle with self-concept or believe they lack writing capabilities.
- Fifteen years of open source development and obsessive publishing created a fast-paced personal writing workflow.
- A personal reflection post on running a tech blog was completely written and published in 23 minutes following a brutal toddler bedtime routine.
- Fear of generic automated content is secondary to the major concern of valuable stories remaining untold due to self-doubt and identity limitations.
Building Content Factories for Colleagues
Encoding deeply held opinions about craft and pedagogical value into automated workflows allows teammates to bypass tedious context assembly. Although machines accelerate production speed significantly, final accountability and brand sign-off remain firmly in human hands through rigorous inspection.
- An applied AI engineer at WorkOS built an automated publishing tool on Cloudflare named blog bot to scale team output velocity.
- Colleagues submit event transcripts and source materials via Slack to generate drafts that are 85 to 90 percent complete.
- Asymmetric leverage occurs when simple interfaces hide complex distributed systems featuring custom data connectors and automated image generation.
Scaling Factories to Personal Audiences and Families
Applying the factory pattern outside the corporate environment demonstrates the broad applicability of automated craftsmanship. Empowering close relationships with customized production pipelines dissolves anxiety surrounding new technology and fosters shared creative engagement.
- A personalized bedtime story application targeting an audience of two toddlers was built from scratch in four hours using Opus 5.5 extra high.
- The application automatically transforms daily photographs and real-life experiences into interactive narrated stories featuring the children as characters.
- Deploying automated tools for small teams or family members generates deep satisfaction by helping others share their unique perspectives.
Description
Zack Proser, an engineer on the WorkOS applied AI team who has written and published obsessively for 15 years, is less worried about AI slop than about all the stories that never get told. He shares how he packed his writing know-how into Blogbot, a Slack tool that gets colleagues' drafts 85-90% of the way there while a human still reads, edits and puts their name on every post, and why craft can survive the assembly line. Then he applies the same idea to an audience of two, building a bedtime story app for his toddlers in four hours, and asks who you would build a factory for. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:26 15 years of obsessive writing 1:18 The bigger worry than AI slop 3:47 Building Blogbot at WorkOS 4:59 Asymmetric leverage 7:19 Does speed kill craft? 9:39 "Every sentence makes me flinch" 10:09 Spark, bellows and quench 12:03 Is it true, useful and beautiful? 13:56 A factory for two: bedtime stories 16:05 An antidote to AI anxiety 17:39 Who will you build a factory for? Zack Proser https://workos.com