Build Your Own Daily AI Digest

What it does (and doesn't do)

A scheduled run fans out to six fetchers in parallel, collects what they find, sends it to Claude, and posts the result to Slack.

1. Collect. Six sources, each a standalone task: Hacker News (top stories via the Algolia API, enriched with clean article text and the top comments), YouTube (recent videos from channels you list, with transcripts for real context), newsletters and blogs (RSS/Atom, last 24 hours), Reddit (Atom feeds plus stickied mod-bot TL;DRs on busy threads), and Twitter/X (via a public proxy, no API key needed).
2. Analyse. Claude Sonnet filters everything against your persona, groups it into your themes, and writes the digest: headline items, quick hits, and content ideas.
3. Post. A themed Slack message via an incoming webhook, formatted with Block Kit.

It reads the web and hands you a brief. That's all. It doesn't post anywhere but your Slack, take actions, or publish. Like a good morning paper, it tells you what's worth your attention and then gets out of the way.

Before you start

Services you'll need

You need three things. The rest are optional and only sharpen the output.

You'll also need Node and a terminal. That's it.

One file does the configuring

src/config/digest.config.ts is the only file you need to touch. It controls four things: the schedule (a cron expression), the persona (a plain-English sentence telling Claude what you care about), the themes (how items get grouped, 2-4 works best), and the sources (which fetchers run and what they pull).

Step 1: Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/hholen/daily-digest-trigger.git
cd daily-digest-trigger
npm install

Step 2: Configure your sources

This is where the digest becomes yours. Open src/config/digest.config.ts:

export const digestConfig = {
  cron: "0 6 * * *",
  persona: "a tech founder focused on developer tools, AI/LLMs, and SaaS growth",
  themes: ["AI & Agents", "Growth & PLG", "Builder & Startup"],
  sources: {
    hackerNews: {
      enabled: true,
      keywords: ["AI", "LLM", "agent", "startup", "SaaS", "developer tools"],
    },
    youtube: {
      enabled: true,
      channels: [
        { name: "Y Combinator", channelId: "UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg" },
      ],
    },
    // newsletters, blogs, reddit, twitter ...
  },
};

Finding the IDs you'll need:

• YouTube channel ID: open the channel page, view source, search for channelId (starts with UC).
• Newsletter RSS: most Substack newsletters are at <name>.substack.com/feed; Ghost blogs use /rss/.
• Reddit: just the subreddit name, no r/ prefix ("ClaudeAI", not "r/ClaudeAI").

Step 3: Set your environment variables

cp .env.example .env

Fill in the three required keys (TRIGGER_SECRET_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL) and any optional ones you're using. For deployment, you'll set the same variables in the Trigger.dev dashboard under your project settings, not from the .env file.

Step 4: Run it locally

npx trigger.dev dev

This connects to Trigger.dev's dev server and registers your tasks. Open the Trigger.dev dashboard and trigger a test run. You'll watch the six fetchers fan out, the analysis step collect their results, and the Slack post fire. If a source returns nothing, that's usually fine (it just had nothing in the last 24 hours), but a thrown error in the run log points you straight at the misconfigured fetcher.

Step 5: Deploy

npx trigger.dev deploy

Set your environment variables in the Trigger.dev dashboard, then the cron schedule takes over. Tomorrow morning the digest lands in Slack on its own.

The fetchers, briefly

Each source is a standalone task. You don't need to read the code to use them, but it helps to know what each one actually pulls:

• Hacker News — top 30 front-page stories via the Algolia API, filtered by your keywords, then enriched with up to 1500 characters of clean article text (Jina Reader) and the top 10 comments.
• YouTube — recent videos from your channels via the Data API, each one's transcript fetched via Supadata so Claude sees the content, not just the title. Rate-limited to 1 request/second.
• Newsletters — RSS feeds (most Substack/Ghost newsletters expose one), filtered to the last 24 hours, HTML stripped.
• Blogs — RSS or Atom (set format: "atom" in the config), same 24-hour window.
• Twitter/X — tweets from accounts you list, via Feedly's public API as a proxy for xcancel.com feeds. No API key. Retweets filtered out.
• Reddit — subreddit content via Atom feeds, plus the stickied mod-bot TL;DR on threads with enough comments (high-signal community summaries).

Customising the analysis

The Claude prompt is built dynamically from your config, so changing persona and themes reshapes the whole digest without touching code. If you want to go further (change how many headline items it picks, or the shape of the content ideas), the prompt lives in src/trigger/daily-digest/analyse-digest.ts.

Adding a new source

The pipeline is built to extend. Every fetcher returns the same shape, CollectedItem[], and as long as your new one does too, the analysis and posting steps work with it automatically. Three steps:

1. Create the fetcher task in src/trigger/daily-digest/, returning CollectedItem[] (title, url, snippet, source, sourceType, publishedAt, optional meta).
2. Wire it into the orchestrator in run-daily-digest.ts: import it and push it into the fan-out behind a config flag.
3. Add config in digest.config.ts if your source needs options.

Known pitfalls

Going further

• More sources. The CollectedItem[] contract makes new fetchers cheap. A company changelog feed, a podcast transcript source, a search-alert API, all plug in the same way.
• More than one digest. Different persona, themes, and schedule per audience. A morning founder brief and a weekly competitor watch can run off the same pipeline with two configs.
• Reshape the output. The analysis prompt is just text. Point it at a different job (a tight three-bullet brief, a longer research roundup) by editing one file.