Building a news aggregator, one agent session at a time
Between October 7 and October 25, 2026, 44 pull requests builtdiscover-feed: a personal Discover-style news reader in FastAPI, SQLite and HTMX, fed by RSS and API sources, summarized by a local LLM, enriched by web search. Nearly every line was written by a coding agent working from written specs. This is the engineering log of how it went — what shipped, what broke, and what we learned.
Latest posts
- Lessons learned building with a coding agent
What 44 specs taught us: prompt format that worked, instrument-first debugging, and where the agent's instincts needed steering.
- Chapter 6c: making the pipeline visible
Chapter 6, part 3: a live pipeline visualizer, a per-story step log merging every event source, and enrichment provenance — PRs #41, #42, #44.
- Chapter 6b: hunting 'database is locked'
Chapter 6, part 2: the SQLite lock hunt — wrong first hypothesis, instrumentation, transaction splits, retry_locked — PRs #40, #43.
- Chapter 6a: instrument first, find the stall
Chapter 6, part 1: workflow telemetry, and the enrichment stall where 45 stories sat pending with a dead worker — PRs #35–39.
- Context, deep coverage, and how outlets differ
Chapter 5: background-and-context links, a deep-coverage tier, per-source perspectives, and planner mode — PRs #24, #27–34.
- Teaching stories to find their own coverage
Chapter 4: web-search enrichment, TinyFish + GDELT, recall tuning, and the content-farm quality gate — PRs #18–23, #25–26.
- Alerts that fire once, sources with budgets, SSRF-safe images
Chapter 3: keyword alerts via webhook/ntfy/email, source management and API budgets, and a validated WebP image cache — PRs #15–17.
- Cited summaries, a publish gate, and an API in four days
Chapter 2: OpenAI-compatible summarization, briefs and reports, the publish gate, /api/v1 + SSE, and story Q&A — PRs #8–14.
- From empty repo to clustered stories in a day
Chapter 1: scaffolding, RSS/Atom ingestion with dedup, a Discover-style UI, text extraction, and clustering — PRs #1–7.
- How I built an open source News Discovery and Summarization feed, with Devin.ai, for $200
A personal news aggregator written almost entirely by a coding agent — 44 pull requests in 18 days. This site is the engineering log.