The DIY Editorial Team Blueprint — build your own content team with Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor (from the ClickMinded 'Little Guys Strike Back' webinar)

ClickMinded's 'Little Guys Strike Back' webinar presented a blueprint for building an AI-powered editorial team using agents like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. The system assigns different models to roles such as strategist, researcher, writer, and editor, forcing them to critique each other's work to improve quality. ClickMinded also offers CoAuthor, a product that implements this workflow out of the box.

Build your own content team with Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. Give each job to the best model, and make them argue before anything ships. This is the full recipe from the ClickMinded "Little Guys Strike Back" webinar. It's not one magic prompt. It's a small editorial team you run from a single agent: strategy, research, writing, editing, images, and distribution, each handled by the best model for the job, checking each other's work. Copy this whole document into your agent Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor and work through it top to bottom. Every step has a prompt you can paste and adapt. Building this yourself is real work, and keeping it running is more work. If you'd rather skip straight to the finished system, that's what we built CoAuthor for. It runs this exact workflow out of the box: the arguing models, the sourced research, the custom images, and a full promote menu that turns one piece into an X thread, a LinkedIn post, an email, a slideshow, and an animated video. Founding-member pricing is open during launch. A great piece of content used to take six people: a strategist, a researcher, a writer, an editor, a designer, and a distributor. The reason companies still pay for that team, even though they all have ChatGPT, is the disagreement. The strategist who kills the boring angle. The researcher who asks "source?". The editor who sends it back. A single AI can't give you that, because it's built to agree with you. So the trick is to stop using one model for everything. Give each job to a different model, and set them up to critique each other. One AI can't disagree with itself. A council of them can. Three rules make the whole thing work: Different model per seat. Nobody makes the best model for every job, and the leaderboard reshuffles every few months. Check a public model arena instead of marrying one vendor. Section by section, not one shot. Ask a model to research, write, or review a whole piece in a single pass and quality drops. Force it to work one section at a time and every section gets sharper. Never ask an agent to review its own work. Use independent agents to do different parts of the work and review each other's output. You need an agent that can dispatch subagents and call different models and tools for you. This does not work well in the ChatGPT or Claude web app, because you'd be copy-pasting between tabs by hand all day. Use a desktop agent: Orchestrator: Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor Strategist reasoning : a top reasoning model Claude Opus 4.8 / Fable 5, or a GPT-5.6 Researcher: A separate agent using Perplexity web , Grok X/Twitter , Apify Reddit and forums , OpenAI deep research Council critique : a panel of models from different vendors. Karpathy's llm-council is a great starter: https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council Writer: Claude Sonnet 5 budget or Opus 4.8 / GPT-5.6 higher quality, pricier Humanizer: the Humanizer skill: https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer Designer images : gpt-image-2 or nano-banana 2 Video: Hyperframes: https://github.com/heygen-com/hyperframes https://github.com/heygen-com/hyperframes Model names are current as of the webinar. Re-check before you commit. Paste this first to set the agent up for the whole workflow. You are my editorial orchestrator. We are going to produce one high-quality piece of content by running a small team of AI models, where each model has one job and they critique each other's work. The workflow has these stages, and we do them in order: 1. Brainstorm - a hardened brief + an outline 2. Research - a research pack, mapped to each outline section 3. Draft - written section by section, then independently reviewed and humanized 4. Visuals - image prompts for the sections that need them 5. Promote - angle/hook strategy, then posts per channel 6. Ship Rules: - Use a different model for each job where you can. Tell me which model you are using for each step and why. - Work section by section, never the whole piece in one shot. - Make the models disagree. When you review anything, be blunt, not encouraging. - Every factual claim needs a source. No source, no claim. - Attach my brand + audience brief below as context at every stage. Before we start, confirm the workflow back to me and ask me for my brief and my rough idea. Everything below runs multiple models, subagents, and live web/X/Reddit searches, section by section. Do it inside Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, not a chat window. The whole point is that one agent runs the team while you watch, instead of you driving six tools by hand. Assign the best model to each seat see Recommended tools above . You'll tell the orchestrator which model to use for each job as you go. Don't run all six jobs through one model. This is the single most important file. It's what stops every model downstream from sounding generic. Write it once, save it, and attach it as context every single time you start a new piece. It's the one input that never changes between projects. Your brief should cover: what you sell, your positioning, your voice with real examples of your writing , your audience persona, what you want readers to do, and topics or claims to avoid. Prompt: have your agent build the brief by interviewing you. I want to create a reusable brand + audience brief that I'll attach to every piece of content I make. Do this in two steps. Step 1: Visit my website URL and read enough of it to understand my business, my offer, my positioning, and my writing style. Step 2: Interview me. Ask me one question at a time, up to 15 questions, to fill in anything the site doesn't tell you: who exactly I'm writing for, what they struggle with, what makes my point of view different, my CTA preferences, and any topics, claims, or phrasings I never want to use. When we're done, write a single brief document with these sections: - Business & offer - Positioning & point of view - Audience persona who they are, what they want, what they fear - Voice & style with 3-5 real example sentences from my site - CTA preferences - Banned topics, claims, and phrasings Keep it tight and concrete. I will paste this into every future project. Don't let the AI agree with your first idea. Make it argue with you to make the idea stronger. In parallel, send subagents to do quick validation, and then have a council of models score the brief before you lock it. The deliverable is a hardened brief plus an outline. Prompt: adversarial brainstorm + quick validation. Attached is my brand + audience brief. My rough idea is: ONE OR TWO SENTENCES . Act as a skeptical senior editor. Before we write anything, do all of this: 1. Steelman my idea: what is the strongest version of this angle? 2. Strawman it: what is the most tired, overdone version, so we can avoid it? 3. Poke holes: the 3 claims I'm most likely to get wrong or be unable to back up. 4. Dispatch quick-research subagents in parallel and summarize what they find: - a web search Perplexity for the current state of this topic - an X and Reddit pull Grok / Apify for what real people are saying right now - a competitive scan of what's already ranking or circulating on this angle 5. If we're stuck in an obvious frame, break it: try the opposite, start from the feeling, ask "what would I actually say to a friend about this," or flip the constraints. Do not be encouraging. Your job is to stop a mediocre piece from getting written. Then propose a sharpened angle and a section-by-section outline. Prompt: score the brief with a council the "make them argue" step . Here is my hardened brief and outline. You are a review panel of models from different vendors. Independently, each of you: score it 1-10 on angle strength, originality, evidence potential, and fit to the attached audience brief. Then each of you name the single most important change before we commit. Summarize where the panel agrees and where it disagrees. If any score is below 7, tell me what to fix. Be blunt. Assume I can take hard feedback. Use Karpathy's llm-council: https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council Deliverable: a hardened brief + an approved outline. Research each section of the outline separately, at three depths, so the writer has real evidence and sources to work from. The deliverable is a research pack mapped to each section. Prompt: three-depth research per section. Here is my approved outline. Spawn subagents to research it section by section. For EACH section, dispatch three research passes and collect the results: 1. Social listening: what are people saying on X, Reddit, and forums right now? use Grok or Apify Capture real quotes and the sentiment. 2. Web research: current facts, stats, and named sources. use Perplexity 3. Deep research: for any section that needs real digging, run a deep research pass. use OpenAI deep research Output a research pack organized by outline section. For every claim, include the source URL. Flag anything you could not verify. Do not invent statistics. Deliverable: a research pack evidence, quotes, and sources per section . Prompt: write, one section at a time. Write the piece using three inputs: my brand + audience brief, the approved outline, and the research pack. Write ONE section at a time. Stop after each section and show it to me before moving on. For each section: - Follow the outline's intent for that section. - Use only claims backed by the research pack, and keep the source links. - Write in the voice from my brief. Match the example sentences. Use Claude Sonnet 5 for budget / Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.6 for quality as the writer. Prompt: independent review + humanize. You are a second, independent editor. You did NOT write this. Review each section against my brand + audience brief. For each section: - Flag any claim without a source or that overstates the evidence. - Flag anything that drifts from my voice. - Rewrite lines that sound like AI wrote them. Then run a humanizing pass to strip the usual AI tells em-dashes for drama, "delve", "it's not just X, it's Y", faux-profound closing lines, robotic parallelism . Use the Humanizer skill for this: https://github.com/blader/humanizer Show me the before and after for anything you change. Be blunt. Deliverable: a reviewed, humanized draft. For each finished section, find where an image would actually help, write the prompt from the surrounding text, and generate it. The images should come from the piece, not from a separate tool with no context. Prompt: find image opportunities and generate. For each written and reviewed section, do this: 1. Decide whether an image would genuinely add value here illustrate a concept, explain a process, or show data . If a section doesn't need one, say so. 2. For sections that do, write a specific image prompt grounded in that section's actual content, including style notes that match my brand. 3. Generate each image with gpt-image-2 / nano-banana 2 and place it in the draft with a caption. Don't add decorative images that say nothing. Every image should earn its place. Deliverable: the piece with grounded, captioned images. Social media is an attention game, and you win attention by testing hooks. So one piece becomes dozens of posts, each trying a different angle, all driving traffic back to the full piece. This is the same play podcasters run with their "clipper armies." Do the strategy first, then produce. Prompt: angle + hook strategy. We're going to repurpose this finished piece across channels. First, strategy only, no final posts yet. For each of these channels X, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, short-form video , generate: - 5 distinct angles pulled from the piece - for each angle, 3 different hooks the first line / thumbnail idea in different "hook families" curiosity, contrarian, data, story, how-to Remember the goal is attention and clicks back to the full piece, not summarizing it. Give me a table so I can pick the strongest angle+hook combinations. Prompt: produce per channel. Now write the actual posts for the angles and hooks I picked. For each channel, follow that channel's best practices and format: - X: a thread and 2-3 standalone posts - LinkedIn: a post sized for the feed, strong first line - Facebook: a post with a clear CTA - Email: subject line, preheader, and body that links to the piece - Short-form video: for animated vertical video Reels/TikTok/Shorts , use Hyperframes https://github.com/heygen-com/hyperframes instead of just reformatting text. Keep everything in my brand voice from the brief. Every post links back to the full piece. Deliverable: a distribution pack of posts per channel, plus a video. Once the steps work, let one agent run the whole thing so you're not driving each stage by hand. Wrap each seat as a reusable skill or subagent so the orchestrator knows when to call the strategist vs. the researcher vs. the council. Prompt: end-to-end orchestration. Run the full workflow end to end for a new piece. Here is my brand + audience brief and my rough idea: IDEA . Move through the stages in order and pause for my approval at each gate: 1. Brainstorm - show me the hardened brief + outline, and the council's scores. 2. Research - show me the research pack. 3. Draft - write section by section, then run the independent review + humanize. 4. Visuals - propose and generate images. 5. Promote - angle/hook strategy, then the posts per channel. Use a different model for each job and tell me which one at each step. Work section by section. Every claim needs a source. Don't move past a gate until I approve. Using one model for everything. You lose the disagreement, which is the whole point. Split the jobs. Writing in one shot. Long single-pass drafts read flat. Force section-by-section. Letting the reviewer be nice. A polite review is useless. Tell it to be blunt and to assume you can take it. Unsourced claims. If the research pass can't find a source, cut the claim. Don't let the writer invent stats. Decorative images. An image that says nothing is worse than no image. Only generate ones that explain something. Summarizing instead of hooking. Social posts that summarize the piece don't get clicks. Test angles and hooks. Trying to do it in a web chat window. You'll spend the whole day copy-pasting. Use a desktop agent. If the full system is too much to start, here's the stripped-down path that still beats a single ChatGPT prompt: - Write the brand + audience brief once. Attach it every time. - Ask one strong reasoning model to argue with your idea and produce an outline. - Ask a second model different vendor to critique that outline. - Have the writer draft it section by section from the outline. - Have a different model review and humanize it. - Turn it into 5 social posts with different hooks. That's most of the value in six prompts. When you're ready for the full team, come back to Part 2. Want the whole thing running for you, without building and maintaining it? That's CoAuthor. 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