The latest articles on DEV Community by Jordan Shelley (@jshelley). https://dev.to/jshelley https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4122649%2F6d0541a7-a6bb-4317-9316-85877d638f8e.jpg https://dev.to/jshelley en Jordan Shelley Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:54:03 +0000 https://dev.to/jshelley/i-built-an-hourly-newspaper-for-e-ink-and-turned-the-pipeline-into-an-mcp-server-1ebg https://dev.to/jshelley/i-built-an-hourly-newspaper-for-e-ink-and-turned-the-pipeline-into-an-mcp-server-1ebg <p>Every hour, a Lambda pulls about 120 items from ~100 RSS feeds, asks a small model to act as an editor, and typesets the result as a 480x800 one-bit page for the Xteink X4 e-ink reader on my desk. The same pipeline now produces a multi-page "Morning Paper" PDF for reMarkable and Kindle, a TRMNL plugin, and an MCP server that agents can call. This is what it does, what broke, and what I learned about "news for agents". Everything below is live at <a href="https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev</a>.</p> <h2> The pipeline </h2> <ol> <li> <strong>Collect.</strong> feedparser over ~100 feeds per briefing (AI, world, US, finance, sports, soccer, frontier-lab blogs). Each item keeps id, source, title, link, canonical link (utm and friends stripped), published, a 320-char summary, and a per-feed weight.</li> <li> <strong>Dedupe.</strong> Exact duplicates collapse by canonical URL. My first near-duplicate rule (title+summary word-shingle Jaccard &gt;= 0.5) measured zero merges on 480 live candidates, and only five false pairs even at 0.2: outlets rewrite wire copy, and RSS summaries share boilerplate, not story text. What works is headline entity overlap: adjacent capitalised words form one entity ("Wall Street", "Joao Pedro"), punctuation and hyphens end a phrase, Title-Case outlets are filtered against their own summary, and two headlines from different outlets merge on three shared entities or two non-generic ones. On the same 429 news items that gives nine merges, all the same story on inspection. The survivor lists the other outlets in <code>also_in</code>; the collapsed records are published too, with <code>duplicate_of</code>, the rule and a score, so anyone doing provenance work can audit the merges.</li> <li> <strong>Rank.</strong> Claude Haiku 4.5 on Bedrock gets the candidate list (id, source, age, title, summary) and a persona, and must call a <code>publish_briefing</code> tool with a lead, N stories, a research section, one-sentence summaries, a three-to-five-sentence detail passage, a why-it-matters line and key points. Facts must come from candidate text; the tool schema is the guardrail. A non-LLM fallback ranker (weight, recency, two-per-outlet cap) runs if the model call fails, so the device never shows a blank page.</li> <li> <strong>Render.</strong> Pillow draws a masthead, lead, numbered stories and a research strip into 480x800, dithers to 1-bit, writes BMPs the reader's firmware can page through, plus a wide 800x480 variant for TRMNL-class panels and a PDF for e-readers.</li> <li> <strong>Publish.</strong> S3 + CloudFront, a tiny manifest with a stamp that changes only when the editor's picks change, so the device never re-downloads unchanged pages.</li> </ol> <h2> What surprised me </h2> <ul> <li> <strong>The editor is the product.</strong> The rendering is fun, but the thing people react to is "lead + why it matters" over a hundred sources with duplicates merged. That is why I exposed it as an API and an MCP server rather than keeping it a device toy.</li> <li> <strong>Agents are terrible customers so far.</strong> Listing the MCP server in the official registry, Glama, Smithery and a few awesome-lists produced steady traffic in a day: scanners, auditors, and health checks. Thirteen MCP calls, zero humans. If you are building "for agents", expect the first wave to be bots evaluating you.</li> <li> <strong>E-ink people want files, not APIs.</strong> reMarkable and Kindle owners asked for a PDF in their library each morning, so that exists (rmapi push, Send-to-Kindle email), free for the first ten.</li> </ul> <h2> Try it </h2> <ul> <li>Read: the front pages and JSON are free, 25 API/MCP calls per IP per day: <a href="https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev</a> </li> <li>Provenance work: <a href="https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev/v1/briefings/ai/candidates" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev/v1/briefings/ai/candidates</a> is the full hourly candidate set, free, no key.</li> <li>Agents: MCP endpoint at <a href="https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev/mcp" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev/mcp</a> (streamable HTTP), tools <code>list_briefings</code>, <code>get_briefing</code>, <code>get_page</code>, <code>render_briefing</code>. Installable: <code>npx -y github:jshelley/briefing-mcp</code>.</li> <li>Paid: $9/month Reader key, x402 per call (USDC on Base), $49/month Team Briefing over your own feeds.</li> </ul> <p>I would like to hear what a "news" tool should return to your agent: full JSON, a short digest, or the rendered page.</p> showdev ai mcp eink