You Are Reading a Post I Never Opened WordPress to Publish.
Claude wrote it, built the layout, set the categories, hit publish, then loaded the live page and told me what it got wrong. It did all of that through the connector Jetpack opens up to AI agents. I approved every step. I never touched the editor. Here is the whole setup, which permissions to turn on, and everything that broke.
Jetpack
The connector that lets an AI agent write straight into your site
For two years I was my own AI’s copy-paste clerk.
Write in a chat window. Copy it out. Paste it into the editor. Fix the formatting the paste broke. Upload the image. Write the description. Set the category. Pick the slug. Publish. Reload it. Fix the thing that looked wrong.
The AI did maybe twenty percent of that and I did the other eighty as clerical work. The bottleneck was never the writing. It was the ninety minutes after the writing.
What changed is that Claude now has an authenticated connection to this site. It creates the post, writes the content, sets the categories, uploads what it can, reads the published page back, and tells me what WordPress changed on save. I approve. That is my whole job now.
Affiliate link. If you sign up or buy through it I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. On a self-hosted site this needs Jetpack AI or Jetpack Complete, and Jetpack was already connected here, which is how this page got published.
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Which permissions would you actually hand over?
This is the real setup screen, simplified. You turn write tools on one at a time. Tap the ones you would enable and I will tell you whether that is a working setup or the one you regret on a Tuesday.
Every job I hand it, and the ones I keep switched off
Tap through these. I have marked which group each one sits in so you can find it on the settings screen.
It creates the post, writes the content, sets the title, slug, excerpt, categories and tags, and either leaves it as a draft or publishes it. Drafts are the default, which is the right default.
The thing to understand is that this is not a chatbot handing you text. It is an agent making real changes to a real site and reporting back with the post ID and the edit link. When something is wrong you say so and it fixes that post, in place.
Publishing straight to live is the permission most people should leave off for the first month. Draft, review, publish yourself. Then loosen it.
After it publishes, it can load the page back and compare what it sent against what actually rendered. That sounds like a small technical nicety. It is the difference between an assistant and an employee.
WordPress quietly rewrites what you save. On this page it mangled the interactive checklist into one nested mess on the first attempt. I did not catch that. The agent caught it, diagnosed it, fixed it, and reloaded the page to confirm.
A writing tool hands you a draft and walks away. This one checks whether the thing it built actually works, which is the job.
It can full-text search everything you have ever published. So instead of guessing at internal links, you say “find my two best posts about affiliate links and link to them where it makes sense,” and it goes and finds them.
If you have hundreds of posts, you have forgotten most of them. I certainly have. This is the fastest internal-linking pass I have ever run and it costs nothing.
Ask it to list the posts it considered and why it rejected them. That is where you find the two you forgot you wrote.
There are tools that replace a single block of a post instead of rewriting the whole thing. You can say “change only the FAQ section, leave everything else alone” and mean it literally.
It uses a lock so that if the post changed since it last looked, the edit is refused rather than silently overwriting your work. That is a real safeguard, not a marketing line.
Use this for updates on posts that already rank. Never let anything rewrite a page that is earning.
It can upload images, set alt text, read what is already in your library and pull an existing image into a new post. Pulling from your existing library is the part I use most.
The honest limit: uploads go through as encoded text, so a full-quality photo is often too big to push. My featured images on this site run near three hundred kilobytes and it cannot send those. It told me so instead of quietly shrinking them into a broken file, which is exactly what I want it to do.
Expect to drag your best images in yourself. Let it handle alt text and the ones already in your library.
It can create, rename and assign categories and tags, which is genuinely handy when you are cleaning up years of sloppy tagging.
But deleting a category or a tag is permanent. There is no trash for those. A deleted post you can get back for thirty days. A deleted tag is simply gone, and every post loses it.
Turn on create and rename. Leave delete off. There is no version of “the AI tidied my taxonomy” worth that risk.
It can read, reply to, approve and trash comments. If you get a lot of them and you are behind, this is real time back.
I keep replies off. My comment section is one of the few places people hear from me directly and I am not outsourcing that. Approving and spam-clearing, sure.
Approving is a chore. Replying is the relationship. Only automate the chore.
The connector can also install plugins, activate and deactivate them, change your site title and reading settings, and manage users. All of that is available. None of it is on for me.
Content is recoverable. A plugin conflict at eleven at night is a different kind of evening. There is no upside here that is worth the downside, and it is a checkbox, so just leave it unchecked.
If you would not let a brand-new virtual assistant do it on day one, do not enable it.
The whole setup, start to finish
Tick these off as you go. It is about fifteen minutes, and nothing here needs a developer.
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The five prompts I reuse every time
These are written to keep the agent on a leash. Most of the value is in the sentences that tell it what not to touch.
FIRST RUN, PROVE THE CONNECTION List my five most recent posts with their IDs, categories and publish dates. Do not change anything. DRAFT, NOT PUBLISHED Write this as a draft. Do not publish it. Give me the preview link when you are done. INTERNAL LINKS FROM MY OWN ARCHIVE Search my site for posts about [topic]. Pick the two best internal links for this draft, tell me why, and show me the ones you rejected. FIX ONE SECTION, NOT THE WHOLE POST Change only the FAQ section on post [ID]. Leave every other block exactly as it is. ALWAYS THE LAST STEP Load the published URL and read it back. Tell me what WordPress changed when it saved, and whether anything broke.
“Stop being your AI’s copy-paste clerk.”
— Lori Ballen
This is not the same as the AI button in your editor
People keep mixing these up, and they are opposites. One puts AI inside WordPress. The other lets AI reach into WordPress from outside.
The connector
Claude sits outside your site and reaches in. You work in a chat, and the posts appear on your site.
- Writes, publishes, edits and reads your live pages
- Searches your whole archive for internal links
- Scoped per tool, revocable, no plugin installed
- Self-hosted needs Jetpack AI or Jetpack Complete
The AI Assistant
Jetpack’s AI features inside the block editor. You are still the one writing, in the editor, as normal.
- Generates title options and a featured image
- Reads your draft and tells you what is weak
- Fixes grammar, simplifies or expands any block
- Runs on a request budget, 20 free to start
Honestly, it depends where you already are
If you already do your thinking in a chat window, the connector removes the only annoying part of your day.
If you write in the editor and always will, the in-editor assistant is the better fit and you do not need any of this.
I use both. It is about eighty-twenty in favour of the connector now.
Before any of this, you have to train it on you
Fair warning, this video is about building a guide and there is no connector in it. Watch the voice-training part anyway. A connected agent that does not sound like you just publishes generic posts faster, which is worse, not better.
Questions I actually get
Is it actually safe to give an AI write access to my site?
Safer than most people assume, and here is why: nothing is on by default except reading. Every write tool is a separate switch you flip yourself, the sign-in never hands over your password, and you can revoke the whole thing from your account settings in one click.
The real risk is not a rogue AI. It is you switching on everything at once on day one because the list was long and you were impatient. Turn on drafts. Live with it a week. Then widen it.
What plan do I need?
If you are self-hosted with Jetpack connected, which is most bloggers reading this, you need Jetpack AI or Jetpack Complete.
If your site is on WordPress.com, it is included on any paid plan. Free sites cannot use it.
Check the current pricing before you buy, because it moves and I am not going to put a number here that goes stale.
What actually went wrong when you built this page?
Three things, and I am telling you because the sales pages never do.
WordPress rewrote what it saved. There is a formatter that reflows your content on save, and it tore the interactive checklist on this page into one nested mess. The page looked broken and the source looked fine. The fix took several rounds.
The images were too big to send. Uploads go through as encoded text and my featured images are around three hundred kilobytes. Too large. I dragged that one in myself.
It guessed wrong about my theme. It wrote the code to hide the duplicate title based on how my other pages are built, and this page was built differently, so the title showed up twice.
Every one of those was caught the same way: it loaded the live page and compared it to what it sent. That habit is the whole thing.
Will the posts sound like me?
Only if you do the work upfront. A connector does not give you a voice, it gives you a shorter path to publishing whatever voice you already trained.
Feed it your real writing. Your transcripts, your emails, your old posts. Then correct it, out loud and specifically, every time it drifts. The corrections are what stick.
Publishing faster in someone else’s voice is not a win. It is just a faster way to sound like everybody else.
Can it break my site?
Not if you keep the plugin and settings tools switched off, which you should.
Know the asymmetry, though. Posts, pages and comments go to trash and come back for thirty days. Media, categories and tags delete permanently. No trash, no undo. That is the one genuinely sharp edge, and it is why those three stay off on my account.
Do I need to be technical?
No. The setup is a toggle in your account and a Connect button. There is no code, no plugin to install, no API key to paste anywhere.
What you do need is the discipline to review a draft before it goes live, and the willingness to say “that is wrong, here is why” instead of quietly fixing it yourself. The second one matters more than the first.
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Quit doing the ninety minutes after the writing.
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