Daily AI news from the useful parts of the internet, minus the part where you lose three hours and somehow end up reading model benchmark discourse at 2am.

This is a private email briefing for you and up to nine people you trust, built in a public repo without putting the private list in Git. It reads a curated set of official feeds, research feeds, expert newsletters, OpenRouter, approved Reddit, and the official X API. It clusters duplicate stories, ranks what actually matters, writes an ELI5 explanation for each pick, sends at most 20, then ends with a cautious 2–3 line read on what might happen in AI next week and one LinkedIn topic opportunity for the next 24 hours.

The initial architecture and implementation pass was built with Codex SOL 5.6. The repo is aggressively tested because “the model will probably return valid JSON” is how you end up debugging email at breakfast 😭

X and Reddit cannot be scraped in a production project anymore. This repo does not pretend otherwise.

• X uses official Recent Search, hard-capped at 10 posts per day. At the current $0.005 per post read, that is about $1.50/month.
• Reddit uses approved OAuth access with a descriptive user agent. Without approved credentials, it fails closed.
• Social posts are discovery and corroboration. Their raw bodies and authors are not stored, copied into email, or sent to the LLM.
• The actual reading list comes mostly from publisher-provided RSS/Atom, public sitemap metadata, OpenRouter’s official feeds, and linked primary sources.
• LinkedIn does not expose a normal API for searching arbitrary public posts. This app does not scrape it or fake a trend scan. The final email section turns the day's strongest verified news into a bold topic with a short “why this topic” explanation and says exactly what its signal is based on.

“Every AI newsletter” here means an extensible, reviewed source registry, not random internet scraping. The starter registry has 34 publisher/discovery sources plus two social adapters across labs, research, infrastructure, expert newsletters, and press. Add or remove them in config/sources.yaml.

30 RSS/Atom feeds + 4 official sitemaps + OpenRouter catalog
                     + approved Reddit + paid official X
                                      |
                         normalize and cluster
                                      |
                    deterministic importance pre-rank
                                      |
                one strict top-20 LLM editorial pass
                                      |
                     final diverse top 20
                                      |
                small strict LinkedIn topic-selection pass
                                      |
                ELI5 + forecast + topic opportunity
                                      |
                  HTML and text email through Resend
                                      |
                 private Postgres idempotency ledger

The model never gets to make up a link. It returns existing item IDs and bounded prose; the app owns titles, URLs, timestamps, attribution, ordering math, and send state. The final section has an Impression Potential score and a separate Model Confidence score. Both use transparent application math; confidence is capped at 65/100 until first-party LinkedIn analytics are available, because a prediction without audience history should look uncertain.

For one email per day:

Set llm.model: openrouter/free for zero-cost LLM mode. It works for a personal project, but free-model availability is not a production SLA. Set a $0.25 hard limit on the dedicated OpenRouter key and roughly $1.50 on X.

The exact research and official links are in docs/RESEARCH.md.

You need Python 3.12 and uv.

git clone https://github.com/pouyabrn/DoomScrollFinalBoss
cd DoomScrollFinalBoss
uv sync --extra dev
cp .env.example .env

Fill in .env, then:

uv run finalboss migrate
uv run finalboss doctor
uv run finalboss run --dry-run

The dry run writes preview/digest-YYYY-MM-DD.html and does not send anything.

When doctor --strict is clean:

uv run finalboss run

That is a real send. The newsletter is generated once, then every configured person gets a separate email. The database ledger and Resend idempotency key make reruns for each recipient/date safe.

If you genuinely want another copy of the already-sent edition:

uv run finalboss run --force-resend

That command reuses today's exact stored HTML and text. It does not crawl again or spend another LLM request. Each forced copy gets a database-backed resend sequence and a distinct Resend idempotency key, so a crashed retry is still safe. The public default allows at most three intentional resends per day.

The default deployment is the checked-in GitHub Actions workflow. It runs every day at 08:17 in Europe/Rome, including daylight-saving changes.

Create a GitHub production environment and add these secrets:

FINALBOSS_DATABASE_URL
FINALBOSS_OPENROUTER_API_KEY
FINALBOSS_RESEND_API_KEY
FINALBOSS_EMAIL_TO
FINALBOSS_EMAIL_FROM
FINALBOSS_PRIVACY_KEY
FINALBOSS_X_BEARER_TOKEN
FINALBOSS_REDDIT_CLIENT_ID
FINALBOSS_REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET
FINALBOSS_HEALTHCHECK_URL

The last four are optional to the generic project, but X and Reddit credentials are needed for the full source mix requested by this instance. Use Actions → Daily digest → Run workflow → validate first. Then run send. To send another copy of today's stored edition, choose force-resend and tick the confirmation checkbox. Once everything works, add a repository Actions variable named FINALBOSS_ENABLED with value true; scheduled delivery stays disabled until that explicit switch exists.

Go to Settings → Environments → production → Environment secrets, then edit FINALBOSS_EMAIL_TO. Put one address on each line, up to ten:

you@example.com
friend@example.com
another-friend@example.com

Commas and semicolons also work, but one per line is harder to mess up. Duplicates and case variants are collapsed. Every person gets a separate provider request, never a visible CC/BCC list.

From an authenticated terminal, this command safely prompts for the multiline value instead of putting it in the repository or command history:

gh secret set FINALBOSS_EMAIL_TO \
  --repo YOUR_GITHUB_NAME/DoomScrollFinalBoss \
  --env production

The onboarding@resend.dev test sender can send only to the address that owns the Resend account. Before adding anyone else, verify a domain you own in Resend and change FINALBOSS_EMAIL_FROM to something like Final Boss <news@updates.yourdomain.com>. Recipients do not need to be added to Resend Contacts.

After changing the list, run the normal send action. Anyone already sent that day's edition is skipped; newly added people get the exact stored edition without another crawl or LLM bill. Removing an address stops future attempts for it.

Edit the schedule in .github/workflows/daily-digest.yml:

- cron: "17 8 * * *"
  timezone: "Europe/Rome"

The fields are minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week, so "30 7 * * *" means 07:30 every day in the named timezone. Commit the workflow change to the protected default branch. The timezone line makes daylight-saving changes automatic.

Use Actions → Daily digest → Run workflow. Choose send for the first copy, or choose force-resend plus the confirmation checkbox for another copy on the same day.

gh workflow run daily-digest.yml \
  --repo YOUR_GITHUB_NAME/DoomScrollFinalBoss \
  -f mode=force-resend \
  -F confirm_force=true

GitHub disables schedules in public repos after 60 days with no repository activity and can delay cron during heavy load. A Render Cron blueprint is included as a roughly $1/month reliability upgrade, but that would push the complete X setup beyond the original budget. Full setup is in docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.

No recipient, sender, credential, private preference, rendered production email, prompt, or provider response belongs in Git.

The workflow has read-only repository permissions, no secret-bearing PR job, pinned Action SHAs, no production email artifacts, and no public newsletter archive. Resend tracking stays off. The database stores a keyed fingerprint per recipient rather than an address. Addresses exist only in the private environment secret and in memory while that run sends.

“Private” still has a real-world boundary: GitHub runs the code, Neon stores the ledger, OpenRouter processes the editorial batches, Resend transports the message, and your mail provider receives it. Read docs/PRIVACY.md before putting sensitive material into private source customizations.

• General behavior: config/newsletter.yaml
• Source registry: config/sources.yaml
• Email HTML: src/finalboss/email/templates/digest.html.j2
• Plain text: src/finalboss/email/templates/digest.txt.j2
• Ranking math: src/finalboss/processing/rank.py
• Editorial contract: src/finalboss/llm/editor.py
• LinkedIn scoring: src/finalboss/processing/linkedin.py

The email uses a black-and-warm-white editorial control-panel system: huge index numbers, tiny machine labels, hard rules, and one small signal color that changes deterministically each day. It is a 640px table layout with inline CSS and a mobile collapse, because an inbox is not a browser no matter how badly it wants to be one. Before changing the markup, test it in Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail.

make check
make audit

Current local gate:

• 62 tests passing
• 84%+ branch-aware coverage
• Ruff clean
• strict mypy clean
• Bandit and pip-audit in CI
• CodeQL on pushes, pull requests, and weekly
• reproducible uv.lock
• migration-tested private send ledger

Start with docs/ARCHITECTURE.md if you want the system design, or CONTRIBUTING.md if you want to change it.