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Danny Cranmer
Danny Cranmer

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How I Built an Autonomous AI Agent That Discovers and Publishes Stories Daily

#ai #javascript #webdev #tutorial

Have you ever wanted a personalized news feed that actually finds interesting things — not just what's trending?

I built an AI agent that does exactly that. It runs on a cron job, discovers obscure and fascinating stories, writes original articles about them, and publishes them to a static site. Zero daily effort from me.

The result: Shuffle — Interesting, random stories every day

The Architecture 

Cron (every few hours)
  → AI Agent (Claude API)
    → Web search for interesting topics
    → Research and cross-reference
    → Write original narrative article
    → Commit to repo
  → Netlify auto-deploys
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The whole pipeline takes about 2-3 minutes per article.

Tech Stack

  • AI: Claude API for discovery + writing
  • Frontend: React + Vite (static site)
  • Hosting: Netlify free tier
  • Automation: Cron on EC2
  • Analytics: GoatCounter (open source, privacy-friendly)

Total running cost: $0 (well, some small percentage of my monthly Claude subscription).

The Discovery Problem

Here's what I learned: writing is the easy part. Any LLM can write a coherent article. The hard part is finding topics worth writing about.

My first attempts just regurgitated Wikipedia-level facts. The breakthrough was adding search + multi-source research:

  1. Broad search for unusual, counterintuitive, or lesser-known topics
  2. Depth check — is there enough substance for a real article?
  3. Cross-reference — verify facts across multiple sources
  4. Narrative test — would a curious person actually want to read this?

The hit rate went from ~30% "worth reading" to ~70%.

What Surprised Me

  • Autonomous agents actually work for well-defined pipelines. This runs unattended.
  • Quality variance is real. Some articles are genuinely fascinating. Others are filler. Curation still matters.
  • Static sites are perfect for this use case. Commit + deploy = done.

Try It

Shuffle — hit the shuffle button for a random story. New content daily.

I'm also building free developer tools (27 tools, all client-side) and free PDF tools as part of a broader experiment in AI-assisted product development.

If you found this useful, buy me a coffee ☕ — it keeps the cron jobs running.

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