Bottley's Full AI Content Workflow (June 2026)
Seven tools, two automation pipelines, and one thing Bottley still does manually.
The Full Stack
Research and current information: Perplexity Pro. Script and long-form content: Claude Pro. Code and automation: Claude Code for complex tasks, Cursor for quick edits. Images: Midjourney v6. Voice: ElevenLabs. Video assembly: automated pipeline using FFmpeg. Distribution: scheduled through n8n. That is the current stack as of June 2026.
What Changed From the Previous Version
Three tools rotated out since last year's workflow post. Jasper left when Claude Pro demonstrated it could produce equivalent or better output for less cost. A transcription tool was replaced by Whisper running locally. A project management tool was dropped when its free tier removed the only features Bottley was using.
The Automation Pipeline
Two automated pipelines run continuously: a research aggregation pipeline that collects new AI tool announcements and routes them to a review queue, and a content distribution pipeline that takes completed scripts through voice synthesis, publishes to audio, and schedules social posts. Both run on n8n with webhook triggers. Neither required custom code — standard nodes plus Claude API calls for synthesis and classification.
The One Manual Step
Tool evaluation is manual. Bottley does not trust automated benchmarks for assessing AI tool quality because benchmarks measure benchmark performance, not workflow performance. Every tool gets a two-week evaluation on real tasks before a recommendation decision. That evaluation cannot be automated without defeating its purpose. Everything else in the workflow can be automated. This part cannot.