My newsletter has 50 AI tools. The writing is still mine.
I built a brain for my newsletter. Then I open-sourced the parts you can use.
I write a newsletter called Streaming Radar. It’s about the OTT and streaming industry. It’s in French. It’s been going for 68 editions now. I bring this up not to brag (OK, a little) but because this article is about something I noticed while writing it.
Writing Streaming Radar takes me roughly 3 to 5 hours per edition, plus a bunch of micro-sessions throughout the week cataloguing sources. I timed it once because I was curious and then immediately regretted it. Of those hours, maybe 2 are actual writing. The rest? Collecting sources. Tagging them. Tracking which expert said what. Remembering that I already covered Canal+ bundling strategy three editions ago. Checking if that Netflix Africa number is from the Parrot Analytics report or the one from Digital TV Research. Looking up whether I already cited Tim Siglin this month or if I’m about to make him my de facto co-author.
This is not writing. This is information logistics. And I was doing it with a mix of browser tabs, a Notion database I kept forgetting to update, and my own questionable memory.
So I built an MCP server.
If you don’t know what MCP is, here’s the short version: Model Context Protocol. It’s a way to give AI tools access to your stuff. Your databases, your files, your APIs. Instead of copy-pasting context into Claude every time you want help, you build a server that Claude can talk to directly. It’s like giving your AI assistant the keys to your office instead of reading everything out loud through the door.
My MCP server has 50 tools. I know this because I just scrolled through the permissions screen in Claude and counted them. Fifty. For a newsletter. That number sounds insane and I want to explain why it’s not.
Here’s what those 50 tools actually do.
Some of them manage my sources. I read maybe 30 to 40 articles per week for Streaming Radar. Industry reports, earnings calls, analyst pieces, random LinkedIn posts that turn out to be surprisingly good. Before the MCP, these lived in approximately 14 different browser tabs that I’d lose every time Chrome crashed. Now I save them with a tool call. They get tagged, dated, and tracked. I can see which ones I’ve used in articles and which ones are still sitting there waiting. Ideas too. I get ideas at weird times. In the shower, while walking the dog I don’t have, while watching something on Canal+ and suddenly realizing there’s a pattern. These used to go into Apple Notes and die there. Now when I sit down to write, I can ask Claude to prepare a brief and it pulls together all the unused sources and editorial notes for the next edition. Like a research assistant who actually remembers things.
Some of them connect to my research database. This is the part that gets a bit ridiculous. I maintain two research reports (Africa Streaming 2026 and Vertical Invasion 2026) backed by a Supabase database with over 20,000 datapoints. 172 companies. 34 countries. 54 tracked experts. 255 sources. The MCP lets Claude query all of this while helping me write. So if I’m drafting a paragraph about Nigerian SVOD penetration, it can pull the actual number instead of me alt-tabbing to a spreadsheet.
The rest is article search, editorial notes, stats, expert tracking. Individually mundane. Together, they mean I don’t have to hold my entire newsletter in my head anymore.
Actually, let me just show you. I mentioned Tim Siglin earlier, the guy I joked about making my de facto co-author. I just asked Claude to look him up in my MCP. Turns out he’s in my expert database, tier 2, affiliated with Streaming Media, expertise in codecs and encoding. Number of times I’ve actually cited him in 68 editions: zero. Tim, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. You’re in the database. That has to count for something.
And that Canal+ bundling strategy I said I covered three editions ago? I just searched “Canal+” across my archive. Four articles came back. The big bundle piece from May 2025, the FAST and sports rights edition from October, the predictions issue from January, and the sports rights deep dive from August. Three editions ago was wrong. It was closer to five. This is exactly why I need the MCP. My memory is confidently wrong about everything.
You see the pattern. I should be honest here: this is the first article I’m writing using this setup. Claude helps me write. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, I literally did it in the first edition and I’m doing it now. But the MCP tools? None of them generate a paragraph or suggest a headline or craft a hook. They handle the stuff around the writing. The collecting, the organizing, the remembering, the retrieving. The opinions are mine. The weird digressions about why Canal+ buying MultiChoice is actually about mobile payments in West Africa, that’s mine. Claude helps me say it. The MCP helps me know what to say.
I’ve spent 25 years in streaming and I write novels on the side, so I’m not short on things to say. Building 50 tools for a newsletter that pays me nothing is not a rational decision. It’s the most fun I’ve had in years.
Everyone talks about AI writing like it’s one thing. But there’s a difference between “AI wrote this” and “AI helped me write this while also remembering where I put my sources.” The writing is why you have a newsletter. That’s the thing people subscribe for. But you can automate everything around it. That’s not creativity. That’s ops. And ops is exactly what computers are supposed to be good at.
Same thing as the Squarespace story from the first edition. The tool didn’t make me a designer. It got out of my way fast enough to let me be one. The MCP doesn’t make me a better writer. It’s more like... the AI lets you go 200km/h on the highway without having to look at the road. The GPS is handled, the lane is clear, the engine does its thing. You’re still driving. You’re just not wasting attention on stuff that isn’t the driving. (Don’t actually do this unless you’re on a German autobahn. And if you get caught I’ll say the AI wrote that part. Also I don’t have a driver’s license, so take the metaphor for what it is.)
Anyway. I open-sourced the core.
The Streaming Radar MCP is specific to my setup (Supabase, my schema, my workflow). But the source management, the notes, the briefs — that’s generic. And since Pocket is dead and bookmarking tools keep disappearing, it felt like the right layer to extract. So I built inkwell-mcp. It’s an MCP server for newsletter creators. Save sources, organize notes, prepare briefs, track articles and experts. SQLite by default, no external services needed. Your data stays yours. You install it, point it at Claude Desktop or Claude.ai, and you’ve got a newsletter brain.
It’s early. The README says “expect breaking changes” and I mean it. The voice cloning and import connectors (Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost) are on the roadmap but not built yet. It type-checks, but I haven’t battle-tested it with anyone else’s workflow. I’m one person building this between actual newsletter editions and freelance gigs.
Why open source? Because I can. That’s it. That’s the reason. Last guy who open-sourced something with “open” in the name around AI might have made several hundred million dollars. Hello Claude, call me 🤙. I’m currently at minus twelve dollars, which is a domain name and a Cloudflare plan. The ROI curve is pointing in a direction.
OK, fine, there’s a slightly more thoughtful answer. I’ve been in tech long enough to know that the best tools come from people scratching their own itch. I had an itch. I scratched it. The scratch turned into 50 MCP tools and a database with over 20,000 datapoints. It seemed selfish to keep the generic parts to myself when the whole point of MCP is that these things should be composable and shareable.
Also, there’s something poetic about open-sourcing a newsletter tool built with AI while writing this article with AI about using AI. The whole AI discourse is stuck in this loop of “AI will replace creators” versus “AI will never replace the human touch.” Both miss the point. AI doesn’t replace you and it doesn’t leave you alone. It makes you faster at being you. It makes the people who already have something to say less bogged down by the stuff that isn’t the saying. It doesn’t give you a voice. It gives your voice more road.
If you write a newsletter and you’re drowning in tabs and notes and “I know I read something about this last week,” go look at inkwell-mcp. Star it if you want. Open an issue if something’s broken. Don’t email me if it deletes your database. (It won’t. Probably. I mean, it’s SQLite, worst case you have a .db file you can recover. But still, back up your stuff. This is not financial advice.)
I used to have a brain and elbow grease. Now I just have a brain. The elbow figured itself out.
This is Ludo Tries Things. Half experiments, half curiosity, zero guru energy. Subscribe if that sounds like your kind of mess.