Build your own AI news curator

Your feed picks for you. An algorithm decides what you see today, optimized for how long you keep scrolling - not for what you find important. You can flip that around. Start with your sources, and let an AI summarize them for you.

This is not all-or-nothing. It's a ladder. The first rung you do this afternoon with pen and paper. The last one runs fully automatically, like mine does. You can stop wherever you like.

Rung 0 - Pick your sources

This is the only step that really matters. The rest is plumbing.

Write down your five most important sources. Not fifty. Five. The newsletter you always open, the two sites where your field actually happens, that one analyst you trust, the blog you'd otherwise miss. If in doubt: which source would you miss if it vanished tomorrow?

That little list is your curator. Not Twitter, not LinkedIn, not the recommendations at the bottom of an article. You.

Rung 1 - Let an AI summarize them

Now the light version, without a single line of code.

Once a week, gather the new pieces from your five sources and paste the text into an AI with a fixed prompt. Paste the text itself, not just the link: a free AI chat often can't open a link and will then guess what it says - exactly what you don't want. A fixed prompt, for example:

Below are articles from sources I trust. Summarize them in at most ten bullets. Add the source to each bullet. Start with what's new or surprising. Skip ads and repetition. Don't make up anything that isn't in the pieces; if a source has nothing new, say so.

That source per bullet is not a detail: it lets you trace every summary back to where it came from. That's the difference between a curator and a slot machine.

That's it. Ten minutes, once a week, and you read your own selection instead of someone else's feed. Summary not sharp enough? Adjust the prompt: "shorter", "only what I can use", "explain why it matters". The prompt is yours, just like the sources.

Rung 2 - Turn it into a ritual

If rung 1 sticks, make it a habit. Put a fixed recurring block in your calendar - Sunday morning, or Friday as the week winds down - and keep your prompt in your notes app, so you don't retype it every week. Add a source when a better alternative shows up, drop one that no longer delivers. For most people this is the end point, and that's fine.

Rung 3 - Take it all the way until it runs itself

And then the other end of the spectrum. There are steps in between - some AI chats can set something up for you at a fixed moment - but this is where it ended for me: nobody pastes anything anymore.

This is also the first rung that costs money. Up to here everything can be free: the free version of an AI chat is enough. A chain just can't type into a free chat window - so you pay for access, a paid account, and for a place where it runs every morning, in my case my own server. And sometimes it breaks: something that runs on its own needs the occasional maintenance. So know why you're automating before you take that step.

I've put my sources into a chain that fetches the new pieces itself every day, has an AI summarize them, and sends the result to my mail and onto my site. One runs daily on the news about Ukraine, another summarizes the tech world weekly. Built with n8n, a tool that lets you string these steps together without writing a full program.

The principle is identical to rung 1. Pick your sources, let an AI summarize them. The only difference is that the copy-and-paste has been replaced by something that runs itself at seven in the morning. And importantly: I can still point to which sources count. That's on my sources page, in black and white. Automating doesn't mean you lose control: you pin it down.