I Built a Claude Cowork Agent That Tells Me What to Write Before I Wake Up
Build a Claude Cowork content agent that scans trends, scores article ideas, checks your calendar, and sends a morning writing brief. See the full workflow.
For two years, picking my next article was a guessing game I played at 6am.
I would open Reddit, skim three newsletters, scroll X for ten minutes, and try to feel my way toward "what should I write this week." Some mornings I found a thread. Most mornings I just collected more open tabs and a vague sense that I was behind.
Then one article changed how I think about the whole problem. "I Stopped Hitting Claude's Usage Limits" outperformed every careful how-to and masterclass I had published that month.
It was not better written. It was riding something my audience already cared about, at the moment they cared about it.
That is when it clicked. I was never short on ideas. I had hundreds.
The real bottleneck was signal: knowing which idea was hot right now, narrow enough to own, and not already sitting in my pipeline.
Every morning I was burning forty minutes hunting for that signal by hand, and still missing it half the time.
So I built an Claude Cowork AI Agent that solves the signal problem for me. I call it Content Radar Agent.
This article is the complete build.
👋 Julley, I'm Dheeraj and I'm an AI systems builder.
I build production-grade AI systems at work by day and ship my own products by night (9+). This newsletter is the bridge between those two worlds. Every system, every build, documented step by step.
Join 1,600+ builders getting the exact AI setups, prompts, and production configs that actually work in your business.
A content idea is worth nothing until you know it is trending, narrow enough to own, and not already on your calendar. My content radar checks all three before you spend a single hour writing.
What does a Claude Cowork content agent actually do?
This Claude Cowork content agent:
reads your sources every morning,
filters for signal,
scores each surviving idea against your brand on a 0 to 10 scale,
drops anything already on your calendar,
and writes a five minute brief that ranks what to publish next.
It is a research analyst, not a news feed. The output is a content decision, not a headline list.
A general morning brief tells you what happened. That is useful for staying informed. It is not useful for deciding what to publish. "Claude shipped Opus 4.8" is a headline. It is not a content decision.
You can run it in Claude Cowork with no terminal and no code. You can easily migrate it to Claude Code subagent version if you prefer Claude Code over Cowork automations.
My radar does three moves a news bot does not.
1. It scores every idea against my brand.
Not "is this interesting," but "is this narrow enough, does it hit a real reader pain, does it fit what GenAI Unplugged exists to do, and is it timely." Each idea comes back with a number from 0 to 10, so I can rank.
2. It checks my calendar.
Before an idea reaches me, the agent compares it against every title already in my pipeline. If I have covered it, the idea gets dropped. What survives is a genuine gap, not a duplicate.
3. It remembers.
It keeps a running trend index, so on day five it can tell me "this is the third day this week your audience raised the same thing." A single morning cannot see a pattern. Two weeks of mornings can.
Join My Claude Code Cohort
The founding batch of my Claude Code cohort starts July 25 on Maven. Six live sessions over 4 weeks. You bring your business problem, we build the system.
Only 12 Seats. When they’re gone, the founding price ($797) closes and Cohort 2 opens at $1,597.
Use code GENAI20 for 20% off. Expires July 22. Check the Syllabus →
Why I Chose Claude Cowork
I am really proficient with n8n so that was my first thought. But when I thought about it closely, I needed five moving parts to run:
a filesystem connector,
a Tavily or Brave Search connector or other search services,
a self-hosted n8n server on a five dollar cloud droplet, and
a metered Claude API key.
That is a lot of plumbing for a morning content digest. Claude Cowork deletes three of those five.
Scheduling is built in. Cowork has scheduled tasks, so there is no n8n and no cloud server.
Filesystem access is built in. Cowork works inside a folder, so there is no filesystem connector to wire up.
Billing is your subscription. It runs on the Claude plan you already pay for, not a metered API key that charges per run.
What is left is almost embarrassingly small. One desktop app. One web-search connector. And a folder of plain markdown files that hold the brain.
content-radar/
START-HERE.md ← how to run it ("morning radar")
CLAUDE.md ← the brain: scan, filter, score, dedup, write
research-profile.md ← your focus areas, avatars, trusted sources, DO-NOT-WANT
memory.md ← what scored well, what was noise (learns over time)
reference/
brand-rubric.md ← the scoring system (what makes it YOURS)
calendar-snapshot.md ← your pipeline titles, for dedup
skills/
morning-radar.md ← the daily 10-step process
deep-dive.md ← research one idea deeper, on demand
weekly-recalibrate.md ← Sunday feedback loop
templates/
content-radar-brief.md ← the output format
logs/
trend-index.md ← accumulated signals (pattern detection)
2026-05-26.md ← per-day session log
output/
2026-05-26-content-radar.md ← the brief, auto-written each morningThat is fourteen files. Most start nearly empty and fill in automatically. The only two you actually need to customize are research-profile.md and the brand rubric. Everything else is the engine.
What did the Content Radar surface on its first run?
On its first run, the radar surfaced a launch most outlets were covering as a feature list and named the angle they all missed, then handed me two narrow gaps my calendar did not already cover.
These are real outputs, not mockups. The scores, sources, and wording below are exactly what the agent produced.
I built this for GenAI Unplugged. The profile and the rubric took about thirty minutes to write. Then I ran the first scan.
Here is what the agent put in my folder, unedited. I have trimmed it for length, but the scores, sources, and wording are exactly what it produced.
TOP SIGNAL
Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business on May 13, 2026:
15 agentic workflows, 15 skills, connectors to QuickBooks,
HubSpot, Canva and more, all inside Claude Cowork. This is our
exact audience and pillar. Coverage is everywhere (Forbes, Inc,
TechCrunch) but every piece just lists the 15 workflows. The SMB
owners on Reddit are asking the question nobody answers: "where
do I even start, and which ones are safe to touch my money?"
Brand fit 8.5/10.
Urgency: Time-Sensitive Trend.
One fact to verify: sources disagree on the plan requirement (Pro vs Team/Enterprise).
Confirm before publishing.
TOP IDEAS (scored)
1. Claude for Small Business: the 3 workflows to turn on first
(and 2 to avoid) 8.5/10 GAP Time-Sensitive
atomicity 7, impact 9, uvp 10, movement 9, timeliness 10
2. Why too many Claude Skills make your agent worse, and how
to prune 8.4/10 GAP High
Note: our "Skills 2.0" covers building skills, not this pitfall
3. Fix Claude Cowork scheduled tasks stuck on Pacific Time
8.1/10 GAP High
atomicity 10 (narrow, named, unanswered on r/ClaudeAI)
Look at what that is doing, because it is not what a search tool does.
The top signal is not "Anthropic launched something." It is "everyone is covering the feature list, and the real question your audience is asking is where to start, here is the gap." A SaaS trend tool would have shown me the spike. It would not have told me the angle the spike leaves open.
Idea 2 scored an 8.4, and the agent flagged on its own that I already published a piece on building skills, so the ownable angle is the opposite one: why having too many skills makes your agent worse. I did not ask it to check that. The calendar dedup did it.
Idea 3 scored highest on atomicity, a perfect 10, because it is brutally narrow: Cowork scheduled tasks are locked to Pacific Time, there is no in-app fix, and nobody has written the clean answer. That is the kind of tiny, ownable, "I searched and found nothing good" topic that quietly wins search for months.
And one more move it made without being asked. On the top idea it wrote: "sources disagree on the plan requirement, confirm before publishing." It caught a fact it was not sure about and told me to check it, instead of writing it confidently and being wrong. That single line is the difference between a research analyst and an intern who guesses.
How does the Content Radar Agent get smarter over time?
It improves three ways:
a trend index that accumulates dated signals so it spots patterns across days,
a Sunday recalibration loop that reads your notes and retunes your profile, and
a calendar check that gets sharper as your back catalog grows.
Day one, the agent has no history, so it can only tell you what is hot today. By day five, the trend index has enough memory to say "this is the third morning your audience raised Claude Cowork limits, this is a series, not a post."
Patterns that are invisible in any single morning become obvious across a week.
It also learns your taste. At the bottom of every brief there is a notes line. You spend two minutes after reading: this was useful, this was noise, you missed X. On Sunday, the recalibrate skill reads a week of your notes and proposes edits to your profile and your DO-NOT-WANT list. Sources that kept producing junk get demoted. Topics you kept acting on get prioritized.
And the calendar trick compounds quietly. Every idea is checked against your pipeline before it reaches you, so the longer your back catalog grows, the better the agent gets at surfacing only true gaps.
On my first run it suppressed two generic Cowork angles because I had already published them. I never saw the duplicates. I only saw the gaps.
Day one it is a smart scanner. Week four it knows your niche, your calendar, and your taste.
What’s inside the Content Radar Agent folder
CLAUDE.md and brand-rubric.md are the two files that power the system. Both are written and in the download. Here is what you get:
START-HERE.md... the one-line launch instructions. Open the folder, say "morning radar," done.CLAUDE.md... the brain. The startup sequence, the signal filters, the scoring step, the calendar dedup, and the exact output contract. This is what turns Claude from a chatbot into a worker that finishes the job and files it.research-profile.md... you specifically. Focus areas, your reader avatars, what counts as significant, the sources you trust, and the DO-NOT-WANT list that filters out hype. This is the file that makes briefs relevant instead of generic.reference/brand-rubric.md... the scoring engine. The five weighted parameters (atomicity 40 percent, impact 20, brand fit 15, mission fit 15, timeliness 10) plus your pain points and positioning. This is what makes the radar yours and not a news feed.reference/calendar-snapshot.md... a cached list of your pipeline titles so the agent can dedup offline, with a one-command refresh script.skills/morning-radar.md... the daily ten-step process the agent runs.skills/deep-dive.md... point it at one surfaced idea and it returns a full research dossier with quotes and sources, enough to brief a draft.skills/weekly-recalibrate.md... the Sunday loop that turns your notes into a smarter profile.templates/content-radar-brief.md... the exact output shape, so every morning looks the same and reads in five minutes.logs/trend-index.mdand the daily logs ... the memory that makes pattern detection possible.
Open this folder in Claude Cowork. Say morning radar. That is it.
What does the Content Radar cost to run?
For most solo creators, it costs nothing beyond your existing Claude subscription. Claude Cowork scheduled tasks are included in your plan, so there is no server and no metered API key.
The only added tool is Tavily search, and its free tier of 1,000 searches a month covers a daily run with room to spare.
How do you set up the Content Radar in Claude Cowork?
You set it up in seven steps: download the folder, connect Tavily, fill in your research profile, tune the brand rubric, paste your pipeline titles, run it once by hand, then schedule it.
It takes about fifteen minutes, and the only file that needs real thought is your research profile.
You can have this running before your coffee is cold. The build is markdown plus one connector.