Originally published at moday.me. Building MODAY in public.

One Post, Nine Languages, Ten Platforms: The MODAY Distribution Pipeline

Write once in Japanese, land in nine languages across ten places

Here's what happens when I finish writing one Japanese draft for the MODAY devlog:

The whole job on the writing side is: finish the draft, run distribute.py once. The rest spreads on its own.

I built this pipeline in three days and have been running every post through it since post #1. Here's the actual shape of the thing.

The design call: split "auto" and "manual" from the start

The first thing I decided was to separate the targets into two tiers.

Platforms with a working write API (Shopify, dev.to, Qiita, Zenn-via-GitHub, GitHub itself) on one side. Platforms with no API or a hostile one (note, Medium, Tumblr) on the other. The moment you try to unify these, the script turns into a swamp.

So:

• Auto tier — distribute.py does everything over HTTP
• Manual tier — prepare_handoff.py emits paste-ready files that a human carries to the UI

The manual tier is the part I haven't been able to hand to AI yet. But everything up to the moment of pasting is automated.

What distribute.py actually does

The flow inside distribute.py:

1. Hero gate at startup. If content/posts/<slug>/hero.png is missing, the script halts. No cover image, no distribution. It's a structural guard against "oops I forgot the hero."
2. Post to the Shopify Journal blog, body + hero in one shot.
3. Register Shopify translations. Reads sibling files webhook/posts/<NNN>-<slug>-{en,de,es,fr,it,ko,pt-BR,zh-CN}.md and stuffs all eight locales in via the translationsRegister API in one batch.
4. POST to dev.to, EN body, with the Shopify CDN URL reused as the cover.
5. POST to Qiita, JA body with canonical_url pointing back to Shopify.
6. Zenn — no API call. Zenn doesn't expose a write API, so I configured the Zenn ↔ GitHub sync. A push lands a post automatically.
7. GitHub devlog: commits <slug>-ja.md, <slug>-en.md, <slug>-hero.png to the moday-devlog repo.
8. Calls prepare_handoff.py to generate the manual-tier paste files.
9. Writes status.json alongside the source, recording URL/ID/timestamp for every platform.

The two parts I'm most pleased with are the hero gate and the Zenn-via-GitHub route. The hero gate makes it structurally impossible to ship a post without a cover image. And Zenn — which deliberately doesn't expose write APIs — still gets the post, because a git push is all the bridge needs.

What prepare_handoff.py does

Produces paste-ready files for the three manual destinations:

The non-obvious bit here is the per-platform dialect.

note doesn't render Markdown tables — paste the raw thing and you get | header | value | displayed as literal text, which looks terrible. So prepare_handoff.py rewrites every table into bold-label paragraphs.

Medium has the opposite problem: copy-paste from anywhere tends to drag metadata in. I wanted the writer (me) to be able to ⌘+A → ⌘+C the page and get only the body. So the output HTML has an instructions banner at the top with user-select: none CSS — visible to the writer, invisible to the clipboard.

Tumblr culture doesn't reward dumping a 3,000-word essay into a post. So I excerpt just the lede and link back to the canonical.

Each platform gets its dialect and culture respected, in one centralized place.

I let AI do the translation too — but only inside the subscription

The whole MODAY pitch is "an AI-driven brand build," so of course the translation goes to AI too. I changed how, recently.

• Before: distribute.py called the Anthropic API with Claude Haiku for each locale.
• Now: I ask Claude Code (Opus 4.7) directly to "rewrite this for eight locales," in-session.

The reason is dumb and unsexy: I don't want a second metered bill. I already pay for Claude Max. Anything that can happen inside that subscription should happen inside that subscription.

This is less a technical call than a business one. For a one-person shop, the most important thing is keeping fixed costs down. Running a Claude Max subscription and a metered Anthropic API charge against the same task is a sloppy way to run a personal P&L.

The other thing that mattered: quality. The Haiku-via-API outputs read like translations — workable, but not native. Going to nine locales means I need rewrites that read as if a native founder wrote them locally. Without that, the brand doesn't land in any of those markets.

That kind of rewrite isn't translation; it's localization-rewrite. Running it through Claude Code on Opus 4.7 gave me noticeably better output than the previous Haiku-API pipeline.

Cutting the cost actually raised the quality. Wasn't expecting that.

The actual day-to-day

The operational rhythm now looks like:

1. Draft a JA post in mobile Claude (usually on a train).
2. In a Claude Code session, drop it at webhook/posts/004-<slug>-ja.md.
3. Ask Claude Code to "rewrite for eight locales" — it produces webhook/posts/004-<slug>-{en,de,es,fr,it,ko,pt-BR,zh-CN}.md.
4. Generate the hero with webhook/generate_hero.py → content/posts/<slug>/hero.png.
5. Run python webhook/distribute.py webhook/posts/004-<slug>-ja.md.
   • Auto-distributes to Shopify (JA + 8 locales), dev.to, Qiita, GitHub.
   • Calls prepare_handoff.py to drop content/posts/<slug>/{note.md, medium.html, tumblr.md}.
6. Open note / Medium / Tumblr in a browser, paste the prepared files.

The only step where I actually think is step 1. The rest is instructions to Claude Code, a script run, and pasting.

From "had an idea on the train" to "everything's live" in one day

The part of this I like most isn't even the script — it's the human-side flow.

Ideas hit me when I'm away from a desk. Commuting. Right before sleep. Walking somewhere. That's when I open mobile Claude, pull up the MODAY project, and talk through the post. By the time I'm home, the draft is basically done.

At the desk, I open Claude Code, hand it the draft, it produces the locale rewrites and runs the pipeline.

The amount of time I spend sitting at a desk pushing words around is close to zero. That's the part of "AI-driven brand build" that actually feels real right now.

Wrapping up

The pipeline itself was also written by Claude Code. I just said "I want a script that distributes to nine languages and ten platforms," and we worked the spec out in conversation.

Still on the to-do list: Tumblr API integration, a dashboard view of status.json, automated fan-out to social. I'll fold those in as the brand keeps moving.

More soon.