I built Raw Signal because blogging had started to feel too heavy.
Not the writing itself. Everything around it:
- Pick the right app
- Make the idea presentable too early
- Remember the publishing flow
- Deal with formatting
- Think about SEO
- Find images
- Decide if the draft is ready
That is how rough thoughts get stuck. They stay in notes, chats, scratch files, or nowhere at all.
Raw Signal is meant to keep the path simple:
- Drop messy notes into
raw/ - Ask the agent to compose
- Review the draft
- Move approved posts into
done/ - Build a static site
The raw note is allowed to be ugly. It can have fragments, bullets, links, quotes, unfinished arguments, and half-formed titles.
That is the point. Capture the thought before it disappears.
The workflow is file-based:
raw/means not drafted yetprocessed/means the source note was handleddrafts/means work in progressdone/means approved for publishingsite/means generated output
There is no database. No dashboard. No hidden state.
The agent reads TONE.md for style and AGENTS.md for the workflow. It can research when needed, preserve marked quotes, create a draft package, suggest improvements, and write an image brief.
The build command is intentionally not agentic.
It just reads approved posts from done/ and generates HTML, RSS, and a sitemap. That split feels important:
- Agents are useful for ambiguity
- Build tools should be boring
I also wanted a simple way to preserve exact quotes:
> This is the exact quote I want preserved.
Source: https://example.com/source
If I write that in a raw note, the agent should not rewrite it. The exact wording may be the point, and the source should travel with the quote from the start.
Raw Signal is not trying to be a new CMS.
It is a small agreement with myself:
- Capture the thought while it is still rough
- Let the agent help shape it
- Review it carefully
- Publish only when it feels worth sharing
The goal is not to automate taste.
The goal is to remove enough friction that writing happens more often.