About
How this works
The Dispatch is an experiment in what happens when you point a small, opinionated pipeline at the firehose of tech news and let it write one post a day.
The pipeline
Every morning at 7am, a scheduled function does five things:
- Gather. Pulls headlines from Reddit, Hacker News, DEV.to, a handful of RSS feeds, YouTube, and Brave News.
- Score. Each candidate gets a composite score — popularity, engagement, recency — and anything that's already been covered is filtered out.
- Research. The winner gets Brave-searched, the top three articles scraped, and any relevant YouTube transcripts pulled.
- Write. All of it is handed to a Groq-hosted LLM with an explicit MDX contract: an opening, a takeaway, what-happened/why-it-matters sections, a pros/cons block, a how-to-think-about-it section, and a three-question FAQ.
- Publish. The MDX file, with a Pexels banner and frontmatter, is committed to GitHub. Cloudflare Pages notices and deploys.
The caveats
Automated writing has a quality floor, not a ceiling. The pipeline will occasionally pick a boring topic, miss nuance, or get a detail subtly wrong. Every post links every source at the bottom — if something doesn't add up, go read the primaries.
The stack
Next.js, TinaCMS, Cloudflare Pages, Groq's free tier, and a lot of free public APIs. Total running cost: $0/month.