Build-Notes

Thirty-Four Feeds and a Philosophy

The Citizen’s Daily Brief ingests news from thirty-four RSS feeds. That number started at twenty-seven, and grew incrementally during testing. It grew because the original list had a gap that would have undermined credibility: it didn’t include enough sources from across the political spectrum to claim it was seeing the full picture. The CDB isn’t a political product — it’s apolitical by design, and keeping it that way meant expanding the source feeds.

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Building an Automated Analyst

The Citizen’s Daily Brief is a daily brief for the people, modeled after a similar intelligence brief that has been delivered to the U.S. President since 1946. Like the PDB, the CDB isn’t a news aggregator. It doesn’t summarize articles. It doesn’t curate links. It produces assessments — structured analytical judgments about what happened in the world, what it means, how confident we are, and what to watch next. That distinction sounds like marketing copy, but it’s actually the architectural decision that shaped every line of code in the CDB pipeline. And it’s a specific decision given that this project deliberately leans into the strengths of AI.

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Who Briefs the Public?

I need to start with an honest admission: I thought this project was too ambitious. I assumed I was being naive and borderline arrogant to even consider it. There, I said it.

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