AI Assembly Line

The AI Assembly Line: From Historical Archives to a Polished Blog Post in Under 24 Hours

It all started with a simple spark of curiosity. While reading a book on the U.S. Constitution, I found myself wanting to dive deeper into the primary sources. I didn't just want to read about the founders; I wanted to read their actual words and analyze them in a new way. This led me down a fascinating rabbit hole, chasing a squirrel of an idea: could I build an AI-powered workflow to go from raw historical archives to a polished, well-researched blog post in less than a day?

As I've documented before in posts like my project to download thousands of documents from Founders Online, getting the data is the first hurdle. But this experiment was about the entire assembly line—from data acquisition to final publication.

Here's how the project unfolded.

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Step 1: Acquiring the Raw Material

My first stop was the Founders Online website, a treasure trove of historical documents. I wanted to get my hands on the writings of figures like Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Abigail Adams. After a quick search with Gemini, I found the site's API, which is the key to programmatic access.

With the API endpoint in hand, I turned to Perplexity, which I've found to be excellent for writing scripts. It helped me craft the code needed to download the writings I wanted and, crucially, to convert them all into Markdown files. As I learned while taming my digital library, having your data in a clean, AI-friendly format is essential for the next step.

Step 2: The AI Research Assistant

With thousands of documents converted, I uploaded the markdown files for Alexander Hamilton into Google's NotebookLM. This is where the magic really began. Instead of spending weeks reading and synthesizing, I could now query Hamilton's entire body of work.

Within just a few minutes of asking questions, the AI generated the skeletons of three distinct articles:

• Hamilton's Blueprint for the United States Constitution
• Alexander Hamilton's Architectural Vision for the American Republic
• 5 Surprising Ideas Alexander Hamilton Fought For (That You Won't Hear in the Musical)

Step 3: The AI Editor and Publisher

The drafts from NotebookLM were a fantastic start, but they needed to be unified into a single, compelling narrative. For this, I turned to Anthropic's Claude to combine the three pieces, refine the prose, and shape it into a final, coherent blog post.

The result of this experiment is the article I recently published: "The Radical Hamilton: What the Founding Father Really Wanted for America."

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Final Thoughts: What This Means

From the initial idea to a published article, the entire process took just a few hours. It's a powerful example of what one person can do with modern AI tools. While I was just chasing a squirrel for my own curiosity, it's clear that this kind of streamlined process could revolutionize content creation. It makes you wonder—if a blog post takes a day, how long would it take to produce a well-researched book? A week?

As I continue to test the limits of these tools, it's clear that the barrier between idea and execution is becoming smaller every day. For content creators, researchers, and the perpetually curious, we're entering an incredibly exciting time.