Building a Personalized AI News Pipeline with Claude

A developer on r/ClaudeAI shared their custom-built system for processing 200+ articles daily to create a personalized morning briefing. The pipeline filters noise and delivers only relevant content based on personal interests.

Pipeline Architecture

The system follows a five-step workflow:

• Ingest: 12 RSS feeds pull content overnight from industry news, competitor blogs, and subreddits, collecting approximately 200 articles daily.
• Score: Each article gets a relevance score against a personal keyword list using Claude Haiku for speed and cost efficiency. Articles scoring below 0.4 are dropped, reducing the pile from 200 to 15-30 articles.
• Triage: Scored articles are classified into three categories: PASS (goes to briefing), PARK (save for later), or REJECT (discard).
• Analyze: PASS articles receive deeper analysis using Claude Sonnet, focusing on practical implications rather than summaries. The analysis answers questions like: "What does this mean for my work? Is there something I should act on? What should I watch?"
• Brief: Everything compiles into a structured morning email with three sections: Signal (act on this), Watch (monitor this), and Deferred (revisit later). The email delivers at 6:30 AM.

Technical Stack and Costs

The implementation uses Python, FastAPI, Supabase for storage, Claude API (Haiku + Sonnet), and Resend for email delivery. It runs on a $7/month Render instance.

API costs remain under $5/month, with Haiku handling the scoring (costing pennies) and Sonnet only processing the 5-8 articles that survive triage. The developer notes that Deepgram would be the most expensive component if audio briefings were added.

Key Insights

• The scoring step matters more than the analysis step. If too much content passes through the filter, Claude wastes tokens summarizing noise. "The filter is the product."
• Structured output with clear sections (Signal/Watch/Deferred) proves more useful than a wall of summaries. The developer tried "summarize these 10 articles" first and found it unreadable, while three categories with one sentence each gets actually read.
• RSS remains underrated as an ingestion layer. Most publications, subreddits, and GitHub repos still provide RSS feeds, making it the cheapest and most reliable option.