Series · 7 parts Published April 27, 2026

Daily briefing bot

An automated digest that watches the sources you care about and emails you the few items worth your time. Seven posts on the same system — one diagram at a time — with an engineering reference at the end.

  1. 01

    A daily briefing bot on AWS for a few dollars a month

    The whole system on one page — an ingestor, a ranker, a postman, all sharing one config.

  2. 02

    How the ingestor walks your sources

    A small dispatcher reads your source list, hands each source to a specialist worker, and drops everything new into one mailbox.

  3. 03

    How the bot picks what matters

    Three filters in order, cheapest first. Most items die at the free filter; the smart AI only sees the few borderline cases.

  4. 04

    How the digest gets delivered

    Five short blocks in your inbox at 7am — or nothing on quiet days. The bot never trains you to ignore it.

  5. 05

    How you change what the bot watches

    Two short Drive docs are the entire interface. Edit, save, the bot picks up the change tomorrow.

  6. 06

    What the briefing bot costs

    A coffee a month, possibly less. Where the dollars actually go in a serverless briefing bot on AWS.

  7. 07

    Engineering reference: the briefing bot architecture

    Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, resource identifiers, region, Bedrock model IDs.

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