Automate Your Morning Briefing
January 18, 2026
I used to start my day opening tabs. Hacker News, a few newsletters, Twitter, maybe some industry blogs. 30 minutes later I'd feel vaguely informed but mostly just distracted.
Now I get one email at 7am with everything summarized. I read it in 5 minutes and I'm done.
What the email looks like#
It's pretty simple:
Top Stories Today:
- OpenAI announced a new model. The interesting part is [summary]. Worth reading if you care about [topic].
- A YC company raised at $X valuation doing something similar to what we're building. Their approach is [summary].
- Popular HN thread about [topic] with some good technical discussion.
Probably skip:
- [List of things the AI decided weren't worth my time]
The AI doesn't just aggregate - it actually reads and summarizes. So I'm not just getting headlines, I'm getting "here's why this matters" or "here's the key insight."
How I set it up#
The workflow has four parts:
1. Scheduler
Runs at 7am every day. I experimented with different times - too early and news hasn't happened yet, too late and I've already started my day.
2. Data collection
I pull from a few sources:
- RSS feeds from blogs I care about
- Hacker News front page
- A few specific Twitter accounts (via Nitter)
- Google News for specific keywords
You could add more, but I found that more sources = more noise. Better to be selective.
3. AI summarization
This is where the magic happens. The prompt is something like:
"Read these articles. For each one, tell me: Is this worth reading today? If yes, give me a 2-sentence summary of the key insight. If no, put it in a 'skip' section with one line explaining why."
The AI is surprisingly good at filtering out fluff and finding the actually interesting bits.
4. Email delivery
Compiles everything into a clean email and sends it to me.
What I've learned running this for a few months#
Less is more. I started with 15 sources and it was overwhelming. Now I use 5-6 and the quality is way better.
The AI prompt matters a lot. I've rewritten it maybe 10 times. The more specific you are about what you want, the better the output. "Summarize this" gives generic results. "Tell me if this is worth 10 minutes of my time and why" gives useful results.
Some days there's just nothing. And that's fine. The email says "Nothing particularly interesting today" and I move on. That's valuable information too.
I actually read it. Unlike newsletters that pile up in my inbox, I actually look forward to this one. It's short, it's relevant, and it's written for me specifically.
The trade-off#
There's a discovery cost. By filtering so aggressively, I'm probably missing some interesting things that didn't match my keywords or sources.
I'm okay with that. The alternative was spending 30+ minutes scrolling and still missing things. At least now I'm intentionally missing them instead of accidentally missing them while feeling busy.
Try it yourself#
If you want to set up something similar, you can use NodeStorm to build the workflow.
The setup takes maybe 20 minutes - mostly just deciding what sources you want to pull from and tweaking the AI prompt to match your interests.