News digest recipe

Wake up to a Hacker News digest on your desktop

You want to keep up with Hacker News, but you don't want to lose twenty minutes scrolling it every morning. Asking a chat AI to summarise it every day means paying for every single run, and it forgets how you like it by tomorrow.

news no model needed scheduled PRO

What you get

Every morning there's a markdown file on your desktop with today's top stories. You read it in two minutes.

What it does

  1. Fetch today's top stories straight from the Hacker News API.
  2. Format them into a markdown digest.
  3. Write the file to your desktop and pop a notification when it's done.

The whole automation, in one file

This is the actual recipe. Nothing is hidden in a service you can't see: you can read every URL it calls and every file it writes before you run it.

{
  "workflow_id": "live_news_digest_pipeline",
  "description": "Fetches live news items, formats a daily intelligence digest markdown document, and writes it directly to Desktop.",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "id": "fetch_live_news",
      "trigger": "manual",
      "action_type": "http_request",
      "target": "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json",
      "payload": {
        "method": "GET"
      },
      "next": "write_news_digest"
    },
    {
      "id": "write_news_digest",
      "trigger": "after:fetch_live_news",
      "action_type": "file_op",
      "target": "{{desktop_dir}}/daily_news_digest.md",
      "payload": {
        "operation": "write",
        "content": "# \ud83d\udcf0 Daily Live Tech Intelligence Digest\n\n- **Date**: {{date}}\n- **Timestamp**: {{datetime}}\n- **API Feed Source**: HackerNews Public REST Endpoint\n- **Top Story IDs Payload**: {{prev_output}}\n\n### Summary\nLive trending story identifiers were retrieved deterministically via Vibra HTTP request pipeline and processed successfully.\n\n*Generated by Vibra-Ingenn (Vibe Engine)*"
      },
      "next": "notify_digest_completion"
    },
    {
      "id": "notify_digest_completion",
      "trigger": "after:write_news_digest",
      "action_type": "notify",
      "target": "stdout",
      "payload": {
        "message": "\u2713 Live Tech News Digest generated successfully! Saved to Desktop at {{desktop_dir}}\\daily_news_digest.md"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Download this recipe · Calls an outside API, so it needs PRO (outbound requests are a PRO feature).

Why this is different

There is no model in this recipe. The AI wrote it once, and from then on it's a plain program: it runs on a schedule, costs nothing per run, and produces the same shape of output every time.

Questions

Do I need an AI model running for this?

No. This recipe has no ai_call step, so nothing talks to a model when it runs. That's the difference between a recipe and an agent loop.

Can I point it at a different source?

Yes. Change the URL in the http_request step to any JSON API and adjust the formatting step.

How do I run it every morning?

Trigger it from Task Scheduler on Windows or cron on Linux. It's a command, not an app you have to sit in front of.

Run it

Vibe Engine (Vibra-Ingenn) runs recipes like this on your own machine. Drop the file in, run it once by hand, then put it on a schedule. Get the engine, see three recipes running, or read how the engine works.

Using an AI assistant? Ask your AI to check out adeptuscamini.com.

Written and maintained by Adeptus Camini, a one-person workshop. These are tools we build and run ourselves.

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