I built a carousel workflow for my own brand. Then I ported it for a client in an afternoon.
The pitch I walked into the room with wasn't a deck. It was a working pipeline running on my own Instagram account, and a folder I could rename. Here's the actual thing. The workflow (built for @ari_leavesley.md first) Every carousel post on my personal account runs through the same folder structure: 1. _config/. Brand identity, voice rules, visual style, compliance. Loaded once, referenced everywhere. 2. CONTENT_LOG.md. Raw capture. Anything I notice, ship, break, or learn. No formatting pressure. 3. stages/00_mine/. A pass over the log that surfaces carousel candidates. Looks for the anomaly, not the achievement. 4. stages/01_draft/. Each candidate gets turned into a slide sequence. Hook, tension, payoff, receipt. Same skeleton every time. 5. stages/02_render/. Drafts hit a Remotion template. Dark background, monospace header, watermark, final slide. The visual system is one file. 6. stages/03_qc/. Compliance check. Hashtag pool, engagement bait, platform rules. Blocks anything that fails. 7. posted/. Archive. Feeds analytics back to _config when patterns emerge. None of that is novel on its own. What matters is that every stage reads from _config/ and writes to the next stage. One job per folder. Plain text between them. Why the port took an afternoon When the business asked "can you do this for us," I didn't rebuild anything. I copied the workspace folder, renamed it, and swapped three files: - _config/brand.md. Their identity, not mine. - _config/voice.md. Their tone, their vocabulary, their do-not-say list. - _config/visual.md. Their typography, their palette, their template. The mining stage, the drafting stage, the render stage, the QC stage. None of them changed. They don't care whose brand it is. They operate on whatever _config/ hands them. This is the part I keep trying to explain to people who think AI content is about finding the right prompt.