How I Built a Local AI Drafting Pipeline Using n8n and Ollama

A real build log of a local AI content pipeline of what worked, what failed, and why the boring solutions beat the clever ones. The Problem With Paid AI Writing Tools If you run multiple content sites, the math on AI writing APIs turns ugly fast. Every draft, every rewrite, every metadata pass costs tokens. Multiply that across six blogs with different niches and different content strategies, and you're looking at a monthly API bill that eats into whatever AdSense is paying out. The alternative most people land on is prompting ChatGPT manually and copy-pasting into WordPress. That's not automation. That's just a fancier way to do the same work with an extra tab open. The Stack n8n — orchestration, running natively on Windows without Docker Ollama — local inference, serving Mistral on a GTX 1660 (6GB VRAM) WordPress REST API — draft delivery via application passwords, no plugins One trigger. Six sub-workflows in sequence. Six WordPress drafts in 13 minutes at zero marginal cost. What Br