Seed draft — replace with a real essay.
The music label was drowning in one task: writing prompts. Every track needs one, I wanted ten tracks a day, and hand-writing each prompt meant I never got past three. The bottleneck wasn’t creativity. It was throughput.
So the first real system wasn’t clever. It was a list of prompt ingredients — mood, instrument, tempo, era — and a way to combine them into a day’s batch. Boring on purpose. The point was to move the work from “inspiration when it strikes” to “run the process, get ten.”
What I learned: the system doesn’t have to be smart, it has to remove the decision that was stopping me.