I Made AI Read the News for Me
Cool Shit I Built With AI, Part 3. It reads everything, scores what matters, and hands me one brief. While I sleep.
Staying informed cost me attention I didn’t have.
In my line of work you are supposed to know everything happening around you while you are busy doing the actual job. Economic development moves on local news. A plant expansion, a school bond, a new grant program. Miss the story, miss the opportunity.
But reading everything every day is a job on top of your job. I was drowning in tabs and newsletters and I still felt behind.
What I built
I set AI to watch the sources I care about, every day. It grabs the articles, filters them, and summarizes the stuff that matters to me.
That is the version that fits in a 30 second video. Here is the part I had to cut for time, and it is my favorite part.
The relevancy score
The scraper does not just collect news. It grades it.
Every article gets a relevancy score against what I actually do. And the score decides where the article goes:
- High 80s and 90s: pushed automatically into my Obsidian vault, the second brain I showed you in Part 2. No questions asked. This is core news for my work and my brain should know it.
- Middle of the pack, roughly 6 to 8 range: the system asks me. “Do you want this in there?” One tap decision instead of one article read.
- Below that: dropped completely. I never see it. That is not a bug. That is the entire point.
So the pipeline is: AI reads it all, scores it all, files the important stuff into my brain, asks me about the maybes, and deletes the noise. My contacts, my projects, and my systems get updated in weekly real time. Every time I am solving a problem, my second brain already accounts for what is happening around me.
No app. No subscription. Just instructions.
Here is the thing people miss. This is not a product I bought. There is nothing to install beyond the AI itself. It is a set of written instructions on a schedule. The AI wakes up, follows the instructions, and goes back to sleep.
Steal it: point this at anything
Your version does not have to be economic development news. Point it at your industry. Your town. Your competitors. Your customers’ world.
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List your sources. The 5 to 15 sites, newsletters, or feeds you actually trust. Be picky. Garbage sources make garbage briefs.
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Write the instructions in plain English. Mine boil down to: check these sources daily, score each story against what I care about, summarize the keepers in one line each.
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Tell it what “matters” means. This is the secret sauce. List your projects, your area, your industry. The relevancy score is only as good as this description.
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Put it on a schedule and add the score rule. High scores go straight to your notes, middle scores ask you first, low scores disappear. Then let it run while you sleep.
The lesson
Turns out I didn’t need more willpower to stay informed. I needed a system.
That sentence keeps showing up in this series and it is not an accident. Discipline is expensive. Instructions are cheap.
Steal it. That’s the point of this whole series. Let me know in the comments what you’re going to build and I’ll help you figure out where to start.
This is Part 3 of Cool Shit I Built With AI. It feeds the second brain from Part 2, which started with the grocery cart in Part 1. The videos are on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at @danielonpurpose.
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