The Daily Scoop: My AI Tech News Brief

Every morning, when I open my laptop, a little banner pops up: today's brief is ready.

One click, and I'm reading The Daily Scoop. It's a tech news brief, written by Claude and published as a page in my Notion. Built just for me, around the companies and topics I care about.

📰 What's in a Brief

The goal is a 5 to 10 minute read. Every brief has the same sections:

• Top Stories: 2 to 5 of the day's biggest stories. Some days have fewer big scoops, and that's fine. No padding.
• Startup Pulse: money and launches. Big funding rounds, acquisitions, viral launches.
• Rapid Fire: quick updates on robotics, energy, transport, AI and markets.
• Tech Oddball: one weird product, gadget or scientific discovery.
• Events: tech conferences and meetups that match my interests, in the cities I pick.
• Tech Throwback: a tech or science moment from this date in history.
• Tomorrow's Watchlist: one or two things happening in the next 24 hours, with exact times.
• Quiz: 3 to 5 undergrad-level questions on the science and engineering behind the day's stories. The answers hide in toggles 🤓

It also opens with The Vibe: 1 to 3 sentences on the mood of the day.

The Insider

The brief isn't written like a boring newsletter. Claude plays "The Insider": a smart, skeptical, tech-nerd friend who's allergic to corporate fluff.

Every story needs hard numbers (speed, price, funding, parameters...), and it explains the technical "how" behind each one. I want to learn, not just know.

🏗️ How It Works

The pipeline has 5 steps:

1. Notion: the settings come from my workspace: the companies and topics I follow (each with a High, Medium or Low priority), the prompt, and the history of past stories.
2. Gather: the code pulls candidate stories from Google News RSS, my own RSS feeds, Tavily, Luma events (through Apify, once a week), Launch Library for rocket launches, and Wikipedia's "On this day".
3. Filter: only the last 24 hours, no duplicates, and nothing that already showed up in a past brief.
4. Claude: picks the stories and writes every section as JSON, citing each candidate by its id.
5. Publish: the code turns that JSON into a Notion page (toggle headings, quiz toggles, links) and logs every story in the History database.

The citing part is important. Claude can only use the candidates it's given. It's told to never invent a story, number, date or source. So everything in the brief comes from a real article.

⚙️ Everything Lives in Notion

Everything I'd want to tweak lives in a Notion settings page, so I never have to touch the code to change something:

• The Master Prompt (the voice, how stories get picked, what goes in each section)
• Event locations and interests
• Time zone
• Which Claude model to use
• RSS feeds

Behind it, there are 4 databases: Companies, Topics, Reports (one per brief) and History (every story and event that's been used).

There's even an on/off switch in Notion. Turn it off, and the brief gets skipped.

☁️ Running in the Cloud

A GitHub Actions workflow runs every hour. It does nothing unless it's past 2 am my time and today's brief is still missing.

GitHub's schedule is only "best effort" though, so sometimes it skips a run. That's why the Mac part does double duty. When I open my laptop, a launchd job shows the dialog that opens today's page, and if GitHub skipped it, my Mac writes the brief itself.

npm run check         # checks every key and Notion database, writes nothing
npm run brief:force   # writes today's brief right now
./mac/install.sh      # installs the morning notification on this Mac

💸 Cost

• Claude Opus 5: about $12/month
• Tavily: free tier
• Apify: about $1.30/month (inside the $5 free credit)
• Everything else: free

So roughly $12 a month for a personal tech newspaper, written fresh every morning. Not bad 🫡