Making my newsletter smart

I write a newsletter every week. Have been doing it for a while now. And honestly, the actual writing part has never been the hard part. It's the prep that kills you. Scrolling through a week's worth of saved links, trying to remember why you bookmarked something, figuring out which three picks actually belong together. That part. Every Friday, a small but real amount of friction.

So I fixed it.

The Problem

My newsletter, Pixel Perfect Picks, follows a simple format: one thing I saw, one thing I read, one thing I heard. Every week. For over 136 issues now (which is more than 3 years, crazy). The content comes from links I save throughout the week: articles, YouTube videos, tools, music. The challenge is that by the time Friday rolls around, I've saved a lot of things, and not all of them are newsletter-worthy. Picking the right three and actually writing it took a surprising amount of mental energy.

Enter Shiori

Shiori is a read-later and bookmarking tool that does a lot more than just save links. It automatically extracts content and summaries, transcribes YouTube videos, handles email newsletters, and lets you search your entire library with natural language. It’s very very simple but insanely good. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to it.

I'd already been using it to replace a few different services (RIP Readwise Reader, it was a good run). The thing that makes Shiori interesting for building workflows is that it has a proper MCP server.

MCP is basically a standard way for AI tools like Claude to connect to external services and actually do things with them. Not just chat about them. Actually pull data, read content, interact with APIs. So Shiori has an MCP server. That means Claude can talk directly to my bookmarks.

Building the Skill

Here's where it gets fun. I use Claude Skills which are basically markdown files that you install as a kind of persistent instruction set. You describe what the skill should do, when it should trigger, and how it should behave. It lives in Claude's context and activates when you need it.

Together with Claude, I wrote a skill for my newsletter. It knows the exact format of Pixel Perfect Picks. It knows my voice (or at least, a close enough approximation of it that I can work with). It knows which sections exist and what kind of content belongs in each one. It even knows to fetch my latest issue first so it can auto-increment the issue number and avoid repeating picks.

The workflow now looks like this: I type /pixel-perfect-picks, Claude reads the skill, fetches my Shiori bookmarks via the MCP connection, scans what I saved this week, picks the three best candidates across the three sections, and writes a full draft. From there I make a few manual edits to get the tone right, and it's done.

What used to take me 30 minutes of scattered thinking now takes maybe 10. And most of that is me refining the draft, which is actually the enjoyable part.

What I Actually Learned

The technical setup here isn't complicated once you have the pieces. Shiori's MCP server is well-documented and took maybe an hour to get running. Writing the skill was the most interesting part and you basically have to think like a teacher. You're explaining to Claude not just what to do, but how to think about the task. What makes a good pick versus a mediocre one. What the voice sounds like. What to check before publishing.

That process of writing the skill made me realize how much implicit knowledge I had about my own newsletter that I'd never articulated before. Why do I pick certain things? What do I avoid? What makes a Heard Something different from a Saw Something? Writing it down was clarifying in a way I didn't expect.

The other thing I learned: the value of connecting tools you already use. I wasn't adding something new to my workflow. Shiori was already there. Claude was already there. The skill just gave them a reason to talk to each other around a specific job I needed done.

The Bigger Picture

I think a lot about how AI actually fits into creative work without making it feel hollow. This is my answer for the newsletter. I'm still the one who saved those links throughout the week. I'm still the one who edits the draft and decides what ships. The AI isn't writing my newsletter. It's helping me do the part of the work that doesn't require me.

That distinction matters. The picks are mine. The voice is mine. The skill just removes the activation energy.